Invitation to help establish a parallel (citizens’) government in India

Arvind Kejriwal's recent video was interesting but because it was not backed up with technology, his idea that people write to him with their issues and that he would respond to them personally is simply unviable.

The idea of citizens looking after themselves is pivotal to the idea of liberty. Given the level of mass technology now exists (including mobile phones and internet), it should be possible to establish a citizens' government that COMPETES with the elected government. Such a parallel government (there can be many of these!) can not only point out key problems, but DIRECTLY resolve them, without the help of the elected government, making it redundant (as it already is, in India).

The concept is based on CROWD SOURCING, and requires technology to funnel all relevant information into (a) the press, (b) government and (c) NGOs such as RTI bodies/ social NGOs.

The idea behind this is to establish a platform like the ones established by Ushahidi. This remarkable world-leading Keyna platform was designed in TWO DAYS. Indians, with their IT expertise can surely do better.

I invite you to offer your thoughts and expertise to establish such a CITIZENS' GOVERNMENT. A facebook group has already been established to discuss further. Join it and invite as many people as you know to this group.

Let's start thinking about this, together, and see where it goes. A suitable website (or multiple websites) can be established in due course, as the concept and technology is refined.

Basically I'm looking for technology savvy people who can operationalise this concept based on crowd sourcing, using mobile phone technology (plus internet). The idea is to involve our massive, educated population in doing analysis and other activities that will directly help Indians to improve their quality of life. Instead of waiting for 5 years for a new government, let's just take charge of our own lives – and our country.

The idea is to establish a platform by which people can directly complain about their problems, and where possible resolve their problems directly, as well. This is about total empowerment . This is also a way of linking the citizen (demand for service) with the supplier of service (could well be a private agency that uses this information to provide answers).

Here's an extract from Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (taken from here) that, along with Arvind Kejriwal's thoughts (linked above), my experience in districts with constant flow of petitions from villagers (most of which do not get responded to), and in managing disasters, prompted this line of thought.

This is a case of AFRICA leading the world. I'm sure we can do better.

1. REBOOTING THE WORLD

On Sunday, January 17, a full five days after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, a text message sent from a cell phone in Port-au-Prince was translated from Creole into English and posted on an interactive crisis mapping site that was being closely monitored by emergency responders. The text was a cry for help from a survivor and it appeared to have been sent from beneath the rubble of one of Haiti's largest supermarkets. By that time, the odds of finding survivors had diminished sharply and many in the emergency relief community were giving up hope. The situation on the ground was dire indeed: without access to food or water some tens of thousands had already perished beneath the immense piles of concrete strewn across the city. But the text message posted online suggested a miracle: could the person who sent it still be alive? Was it possible they made it through the excruciatingly long wait for help? An American search-and-rescue team raced to the scene to find out. Many hours later, after having cut through several feet of concrete, the rescuers had a horrible realization: the body being pulled from the rubble was that of a child. The small, frail frame of a seven-year-old girl emerged from the supermarket wreckage, deeply shaken and barely alive. The little girl, overwhelmed with relief and emotion, recounted her terrifying experience to her astonished family. She had managed to survive on a small ration of leathery fruit snacks, and a whole lot of hope.

It was a glimmer of light in an otherwise tragic story. Indeed, few people will soon forget the horrendous damage inflicted by the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010, causing more human misery and economic damage than any earthquake on record. In a mere forty-five seconds of seismic contortions, an astonishing 15 percent of the nation's population-1.5 million people?was rendered homeless. Tens of thousands were dead, and hundreds of thousands more were injured. Any semblance of the usual infrastructure emergency crews depend on (roads, hospitals, water, sanitation, electrical power, and communication networks) was obliterated. Vast regions of the 250-year-old city utterly toppled.

The ruthless and indiscriminate wrath of nature's forces, however, was just a prelude to the real misery. Circumstances on the ground made life astonishingly difficult for first responders. The sea- and airports were congested and there were too few trucks to transport supplies and no safe place to store them. No one?not the army, the government, or the aid community?had a clear picture of the full scale of the catastrophe unfolding around them. There was confusion about precisely which supplies had been received, and in what quantities. There was also a lack of coordination among aid agencies and other entities about which people and areas to prioritize and how to overcome this logistical nightmare. This initial lack of coordination, in turn, left Haiti's earthquake victims (already among the poorest people in the world) utterly destitute, without food, water, or clothing, separated from their loved ones, and many in desperate need of medical attention. Yet, out of the rubble, and in the face of tremendous suffering, came a powerful story of how an ad hoc team of volunteers from around the world came together to concoct an information management solution that far surpassed anything the official crisis response team had mustered, including the world's largest emergency relief organizations, the U.S. State Department, and even the U.S. Army.

At the heart of the volunteer effort was a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi whose crisis-mapping site allows users to submit eyewitness accounts or other relevant information in a disaster situation via e-mail, text, or Twitter?and then visualize the frequency and distribution of these events on a map. Ory Okolloh, a prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, first came up with the idea in 2008 when violence erupted in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed election. After hearing many disturbing reports of rape, looting, and murder from friends and family across the country, she suspected that the government and the official news agencies were grossly underreporting the violence. The proof came when her own vivid reporting on her blog Kenyan Pundit triggered a flood of e-mails and texts from hundreds of Kenyans who had witnessed or experienced violence firsthand. The volume of reports soon overwhelmed Okolloh's ability to authenticate and document them using her blog, so she sketched out the basic parameters of an Internet mapping solution, and with the help of some fellow Kenyan technology whizzes, built the Ushahidi platform over a long weekend. Within hours of its launch, the site was collecting user-generated cell phone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes, and deaths and plotting them on a map, using the information supplied by informants. For the first time, interested parties could see at a glance which areas of the country were experiencing trouble. Indeed, the site collected more testimony with greater speed and broader reach than the media or the local officials, except in Ushahidi's case there was a big difference: Okolloh didn't have government grants, official mandates, formal command structures, or elaborate communication protocols; just a loose group of committed individuals under effective grassroots leadership harnessing rudimentary open-source technologies to help those in need.

When disaster struck Haiti two years later, Ushahidi's director of crisis mapping, Patrick Meier, sprang into action. Meier had been enjoying a quiet evening watching the news at his home in Boston. It was 7:00 p.m. when he first learned about the earthquake. By 7:20, he'd contacted a colleague in Atlanta. By 7:40, the two were setting up a dedicated site for Haiti on the Ushahidi platform. By 8:00, they were gathering intelligence from everywhere, in a global effort to crowdsource assistance for Haiti.

Since the majority of incoming text messages were in Creole, they needed a translation service. And since most reports lacked sufficient location details, they needed a way to quickly identify the GPS coordinates so that incidents could be mapped as accurately as possible. So Meier reached out to dozens of Haitian communities for help, including the large diaspora in Boston. Soon hundreds of volunteers around the world were using Ushahidi-Haiti to translate, categorize, and geo-locate urgent life-and-death text messages in real-time. Many of the volunteers spent weeks on end on their laptops in a dimly lit school basement in Boston that Meier converted into a makeshift situation room. Although located some 1,640 miles from the scene, the volunteer crisis mappers used Skype to relay critical information about the location of potential survivors to search-and-rescue teams on the ground in Port-au-Prince. They responded to requests from the World Food Program and the aircraft carrier. USS Carl Vinson in the middle of the night. And to better link calls with specific GPS coordinates, they even got direct access to DigitalGlobe's high-resolution satellite imagery and to the U.S. Army's video footage from military drones. By the time Meier's group had honed their process, text messages were being translated into English and posted online just minutes after they left a mobile phone in Haiti. And as a result of their dedication, Ushahidi's crisis mappers found themselves center stage in an urgent effort to save lives during one of the largest relief operations in history.

"If a relief worker from the Red Cross has a field office in the neighborhood of Delmas," says Meier, "they could subscribe to Ushahidi to receive information on all reports originating from their immediate vicinity by specifying a radius." Not only were responders able to specify their geographic area of interest, but they could also select the type of alert, say collapsed buildings, medical emergencies, food shortages, or looting. Now as the focus shifts from crisis relief to rebuilding in the years to come, Meier thinks Ushahidi's crisis-mapping tools could just as readily be used by Haitians to hold crisis-relief organizations, private contractors, and the local government accountable for higher standards than have been the norm during the many years of failed efforts to lift the impoverished Caribbean nation out of poverty. Indeed, this everyone-as-informant mapping heralds some pretty profound changes as the wild world revolutionizes the work of humanitarians, journalists, and soldiers who provide aid and assistance in some of the most unforgiving circumstances imaginable.

In the old crisis management paradigm, big institutions and aid workers parachute into a crisis, assess the situation, and dispense aid with the limited information they have. Most aid organizations don't have good systems for sharing information, and certainly don't like ceding turf or marching to the beat of another organization's drum. The resulting fragmentation leads to poor decision making, redundancy, and confusion, and often to wasted money and wasted opportunities.' To make matters worse, the end recipients of disaster relief are almost always treated as helpless victims and passive consumers of other people's charity. This makes for perversely compelling television drama (so-called disaster porn temporarily boosted CNN's ratings by 95 percent), but it fails miserably in delivering results. Indeed, a report produced by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies following the international community's response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami highlighted the need for better coordination as well as victim participation in future disaster relief efforts to help ensure that the needs and interests of disaster victims are not sidestepped in the rush to implement solutions.'

The new paradigm for humanitarian efforts turns much of the conventional wisdom upside down. Rather than sit idly waiting for help, victims supply on-the-ground data using cell phones or whatever communication channels are available to them. Rather than simply donate money, a self-organized network of volunteers triages this data, translating and authenticating text messages and plotting incidents on interactive mapping displays that help aid workers target their response. And rather than just forge ahead with narrow institutional priorities, new communication channels like Ushahidi enable the whole emergency relief ecosystem to operate like a coherent entity. Sure, a lot could go wrong with this distributed model. People could get the address wrong or exaggerate their situation. But as data accumulates, interactive crisis maps can quickly reveal emerging patterns and vital information in an emergency situation: How many miles inland did the tsunami kill? Which roadways are passable and where are the closest temporary emergency wards? Are the incidents of violence and looting broadly dispersed or concentrated around certain neighborhoods?

Given an open platform and a complement of simple tools, it turns out ordinary people can create effective new information services that are speedier and more resilient than traditional bureaucratic channels.

What is remarkable is that the Ushahidi-Haiti project might have taken a government agency with loads of money a year or more to execute. Yet, thanks to social innovators like Okolloh and Meier, the crisis-mapping community rallied to pull it together in a matter of days with absolutely no cost to the taxpayer.