DigiActive.org

Case Study: The Report Card on Vote Report India Version 1.0

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 to all the people who contributed 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.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

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

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 Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

Campaign: Pink Panties to Fight Fundamentalism

Description: When a gang of politically well-connected Indian religious conservatives beat up women because they were in a
pub in the Indian city of Mangalore in end-January 2009, few expected the response to be so innovative and impactful.

Mixing Facebook and the bizarre, a group of young women (and some men backing them) launched the Consortium of Pub-going,
Loose and Forward Women. Not only was their name unusually self-deprecatory, but their action wholly unexpected. They
announced plans to send “pink underwear” in protest to the offices of the Rama Sene, one of the many sprouting groups
here that uses religiosity and the name of the Indian god Rama to justify its campaigns.

This caught on fast, and the Facebook group has currently grown to 56,160 members. The media loved the story, and literally hundreds of articles were written about it.

Its success came from the fact that the campaign was innovative, almost bizarre, and appealing to the youth too. The cause got wide coverage, embarrassing conservatives justifying restrictions on women or religious-infighting among different groups in this diverse country. For example, the ad from a billboard from a prominent Indian butter company (Amul), below, refers to the campaigners’ unusual act, drawing even more attention.

This has become one of India’s cause celebre in campaigning, though it has earned criticism from both Right (who see it as targeted against one important conservative party, in a key election year) and the Left (a section of which seems taken by surprise, or even inable to comprehend the kind of campaign involved).

Digital Tools Being Used: Facebook, blog

How These Tools are Being Used: Internet users can join a Facebook group. Real-world action involved actually posting pink ‘chaddis’ (underwear) to the fundamentalists. Off-line campaigns have continued, including Take Back The Night campaigns in States where conservative governments were in power, such as Karnataka. Groups are being formed in other parts of India too.

On Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=49641698651&ref=ts

Interesting analysis; Three Lessons Activists and Marketers Can Learn From India’s Valentine’s Day Pink Panty Campaign
http://tinyurl.com/d4znu4

Nisha Susan (group founder) explains: Valentine’ Warriors — The Pink Chaddi Campaign: why it began and how
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Op280209valentine_warrior.asp

UPDATE: please also check out Gaurav Mishra’s excellent post on the many online responses to the Sri Rama Sene attacks, including several interesting videos:
http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/the-valentines-day-pink-chaddi-campaign-indian-pubgoing-women-vs-shri-ram-sena/

Tool: Newsrack.in

Tool Description: In an increasingly globalised environment, information has been recognised as the key to development. NGOs and activists have their own info-gathering needs, and have used a sissors-and-gum newspaper-based system. A new tool, Newsrack.in, automates the process and customises it in a way that can match precise needs.

This free service allows anyone to ‘track’ published news (using key-words) they’re interest in. Instead of searching through scores of newspapers, Newsrack.in keeps track of the news on one or more issues — electronically. You can also ’share’ the news that others keep track of. Crucial when it comes to info-activism, and keeping uptodate on the issue you’re working on. It was created by Indian techie Subramanya Sastry. The site has about 12,000 unique visitors a month tovthe site itself, and a majority of these visitors are from India. In addition, there are over 10,000 unique requests to the various RSS feeds that newsrack generates.

Activist Application: This tool can be useful to keep track of news specifically related to issues you work on (say, child-labour, poverty, water, sanitation). It can be customised and used in any part of the globe, after editing a few simple files.

Ease of Use: Moderate. You create an account, then create concept areas (defined by keywords) for the news areas you want to track. You can track more than one area and you can break your area into different categories.

Report from DigiActive’s Bangalore Meet-up

We had a great meet-up yesterday at the offices of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore (thanks so much to Sunil, Pranesh,  Sanchia, and Deepika for making it possible!)  It was a very diverse group, with participants from Indian and international NGOs, techies from Yahoo!, and even a radio producer and film-maker.

We started out by dissecting this Pink Chaddis campaign, a very popular women’s rights campaign organized through Facebook that had just organized a big action on Valentines’ Day.  (I’ll be posting on the campaign a little later – it’s a great one.)

However, when we went about creating a definition for digital activism, the discussion became more theoretical.  Although DigiActive is optimistic about the possibility of digital tools to empower those fighting injustice, this meet-up group decided that digital activism was value neutral and that it simply mapped onto the existing goals and motives within a society.  It is a technique that can be used for constructive or destructive ends.

At the end of the event, some participants came up to me to make sure my feelings weren’t hurt by the disagreement, but I assured them I was really happy with the result.  Only if digital activism is debated and dissected will we be able to understand and use it well.

Tools: Twittering Crisis News in Mumbai

Tool Description: Most of the time, people use Twitter, a phone-based micro-blogging service, to tell their friends what they doing (”walking 2 store w/ dog”), but following the terrorists attacks in Mumbai on November 26th, Twitter became a platform for participative news gathering and dissemination.

Activist Application: Following the terrorist attacks, residents of Mumbai used their mobile phones to “tweet” live updates of the crisis. By using the tag #mumbai, tweets from individual users were aggregated into a single channel (see below), which people interested in getting the latest updates could follow. In this way, news collection and dissemination became participative. People acted as citizen journalists by tweeting what they saw, and the aggregation function of the tag “#mumbai”allowed for automatic broadcast of that news back to the public.

Ease of Use: Very easy. You can create a free account at https://twitter.com/signup. Then you can post short messages via mobile in the USA (short code: 40404) and India (short code: 5566511) and via the web in other countries. Your messages will automatically be displayed on your Twitter homepage, where a “follow” button below your profile picture allows other users to subscribe to your tweets.

Hat-tip: Patrick Meier on iRevolution

Opportunity: Info-Activism Camp in India

We encourage all our readers (and members) to apply to the Info-Activism Camp in Bangalore, India this February 19-25.  This 7-day training event, organized by the non-profit Tactical Technology Collective, will be a place to learn and share digital activism tactics with an international group of over 100 trainers and activists, including DigiActive’s co-founder, Mary Joyce, who is a member of the advisory group. Please see the official call for applications below.  You can also find more information at www.informationactivism.org.  You can find the application after the jump.  Good luck!

Call for Applications

Struggling to make an impact on your target audience? Are issues unresolved despite your best efforts? Do the internet, mobile phones or information design present exciting possibilities in advocacy but difficult to take advantage of? The Info Activism camp, to be held in Bangalore, India from February 19 to 25, offers rights advocates the chance to make a greater impact in their work.

The seven-day camp, organised by Tactical Technology Collective helps advocates to make the best use of information, communication and digital technologies to achieve their objectives. The first-ever international camp on info activism will feature 120 participants, picked through a competitive selection process, and who will not only learn but also share skills and techniques to aid in the process of advocacy. Workshops, group discussions, interactive sessions and live demos, which to a large extent will evolve from participants’ proposals, are all part of the one-week programme. Info-Activism is a compelling approach to launch campaigns and bring issues to light. The camp presents a great opportunity for rights advocates to enhance their skills. If you want to learn more about the camp,please go to http://www.informationactivism.org

The full application is after the jump.  Scholarships are available for those who need help covering the cost of attending.

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Campaign: Sex Education from a Mobile Ringtone

A ringtone that repeats the word “condom” sung in different melodies to spread the word of safe sex in India. According to Yvonne MacPherson, this is the “first time a mobile ring-tone had been used to communicate a social or public health message.” So far, the ringtone has been downloaded over 270,000 times and is helping to spark conversations about safe sex and to break condoms out of being a taboo subject (no pun intended).

Digital Tools Being Used: mobile cell phones (more info at MobileActive and ICT4Peace)

Digitally Active Org: The Sex Workers Project

Web site: www.sexworkersproject.org
What was it?: The Sex Workers Project, based in New York, has used technology in its mission to defend the rights of sex workers around the world. One of their goals is to remove a rule prohibiting organizations that work with prostitutes from receiving money from the PEPFAR AIDS prevention fund and the federal development agency USAID.
Where is it?: New York, USA
Tools: podcasts, digital video, blog, listservs, SMS

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