Democratic Engagement: Ideas For The People, From The People

 

India has not leveraged internet as a means to making the voice of common people heard to the government. An internet based mechanism to voice people’s opinions can be an extremely valuable tool to policy makers in gauging the necessity of a particular proposal provide a mechanism by which innovative ideas from the grassroots can be easily proposed to the government provide accountability of the government to its people.

Challenge

• Design a website through which people can make their demands and opinions known to the government, as well as the government can make its various projects known to the common people. A few thoughts about this.
• Show any user the most relevant ideas by filtering according to popularity, location, interests etc.
• Ideally, an user can be identified by his/her Aadhar number, which can serve as a gateway against fraudulent overvoting. On the other hand, it should also respect user’s privacy, and not store the exact Aadhar numbers.
• To gauge the priority of a particular issue to an user, there should be a fixed number of “credits” for each user, which can be used by them to vote for ideas. This policy will ensure that only the most pressing issues relevant to each user are voted for.
• Possibility of being accessed by various mediums such as internet/e-mail/sms etc. Multiple access channels will enable a significantly larger fraction of the society to be involved in this effort.
• A common interface by which government officials can provide information about status, funding and deadlines for ongoing projects, which can bring about transparency in governance.

Contact

Subhasis Das (subhasis256 [at] gmail [dot] com)

Food Security Bill

India recently passed a very important piece of legislation, the Food Security Bill. This is an ambitious piece of legislation. It has dramatic costs, and equally dramatic outcomes if successfully implemented.

The task is to read the text of the food security bill and other relevant documents, and produce a summary sheet of the principal provisions, costs and putative benefits of this bill.

Resources

PRS Legislative Research:
http://www.prsindia.org/
@PRSLegislative on Twitter

Text of the bill

Click to access Food%20Security%20Bill,%202013.pdf

Elections 2013-2014: Can we bring voters to a consensus?

We see the world with a bias towards our beliefs. For example, if I am against war on Syria, I would take all news indicating WMD use in Syria as ‘forged’ and take all news against the war as ‘positive’ news. Thus people with polarized thoughts tend to become even more polarized, a situation certainly not positive for democracy. In India’s context, people who think Modi is communal, tend to ignore all news about development in Gujarat, and people who think that he has done a huge lot of development tend to ignore news about his communal nature.

Can we use these concepts and attempt towards reaching a better consensus for Elections 2013/2014 in India? Maybe starting with Delhi Vidhan Sabha? A tripartite fight, and the possibility of a hung assembly would mean a waste of over hundreds of crores of rupees for campaigning. Can we help people achieve a better consensus and vote more consistently during elections, help them understand the party manifestos, their candidates, their ideas, and visions in a much simpler way?

Election Consensus

A simple website, firstly indicating party manifestos, achievements, candidates, their achievements, their visions, ideas, implementations, education level, criminal records, etc. for Delhi Vidhan Sabha. In addition to this, people are allowed to add positive / negative points about any entity in the website (entity is a party candidate, vision, idea etc). These points about entities get upvoted / downvoted by peers in the network of the people and get translated neatly to everyone. So everyone learns what are the most important points about different entities in the graph. People are allowed free form of communication in the form of easy chat / message system.

The goal is to help people easily learn about their candidates and parties, and possibly reach a consensus from wisdom of crowds. At the end no one wants their vote to get wasted, and they want to vote where it’s being most useful. And most people believe in wisdom of the crowds, by learning the positive and negative aspects of the candidates profile and manifesto, the system could possibly reach a better consensus for elections.

Can we extend this idea towards national elections? Or maybe towards other national issues? Consensus and people participation are probably two most important properties of a successful democracy. Can we possibly make an attempt towards a better democratic system ?

Swaniti Initiative

What is Swaniti?

Swaniti is an open-governance initiative that focuses on creating channels of lateral entry by working with elected officials through our Fellowship program and Governance Lab. We are a non-profit and non-partisan organization. Further details about our work is available on www.swaniti.in.

What is Jigyasa?

Jigyasa (jigyasa.swaniti.in) is a program within Swaniti that is an interactive virtual platform that maps development indicators during the tenure of various administrations in states over decades with the goal of quantifying through hard data the performance of governments in delivery of public service goods. Our platform focuses on creating consumable data for citizens and elected officials to objectively setout OUTPUT oriented performance on government service delivery.

Swaniti has been kind enough to provide us with challenges that mirror real life to quite an extent, as also the life of Jack Bauer 🙂 Since their work is not really one that can finish 12 hours, their challenges are in some sense, hooks to get you involved with them! Swaniti is looking for developers to help them out in the long run as well, so if either the challenges, website, mission or data analysis on Jigyasa, we would love to put you in touch with them.

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 Challenges

Challenge I: Create visualizations for data

It is four in the afternoon on the day before a major speech has to be made to the Parliament by the Prime Minister on developmental performance of India on some of the key metrics. You have been contacted by the Prime Minister’s office to create ‘consumable’ visualizations for Parliamentarians on the basis of the four data sets provided to you. The visualizations should be interactive and user-friendly. You have the option of adding a one page brief to explain/highlight any additional pieces. Your deadline is by four the next morning.

Challenge II: Developing a database

You just received a text from a two friends who work on in Central Ministries. They are a bit ‘consumed’  because even though they have been circulating information briefs about the recent governmental schemes to Members of Parliament and Legislative Assembly, they keep receiving requests about letting MPs and MLAs know which schemes are best for them. They have approached you to make a searchable database targeted toward MPs and MLAs that would provide them with an online portal to find information pertinent to them. As a sample set, you have been provided five centrally sponsored schemes to begin populating the database. Keep in mind that you want to a user-friendly search engine

Data

Sample data base 1

Sample data base 2