Vote Report India, a collaborative citizen-powered election monitoring platform for Indian goes LIVE

India will hold general elections to the 15th Lok Sabha in 5 phases on April 16, April 22, April 23, April 30, May 7 and May 13, 2009. The results of the election will be announced in single phase on May 16, 2009.

After less than 10 days of incredible behind the scene’s work by some wonderful volunteers, technologists and bloggers, we are proud to introduce VoteReport India – a crowd-sourced collaborative election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections.

The timing for VoteReport India could not have been better given that the Ushahidi team had spent a weekend geeking about what the next iteration of Ushahidi should look like. Ushahidi, has come quite a way’s since its intial response to track the post election violence in Kenya. Since then it has been launched independently in hosted instance such as the DRC, and through partnerships like the one with Al Jazeera during the Gaza conflict.

The VoteReport India instance is particularly interesting given the complexity and magnitude of the Indian election landscape. Ushahidi’s strength has always been to put the right tools to keep OUR elections honest in the hands of the common man. A citizen with access to the web or at the very least a mobile phone, is empowered to report any improper election conduct and these would cluster on the map. Crowds can do wonderful things when given access to the right tools as seen after the November 26 Mumbai attacks that brought a flood of concerned citizens fourth flooding channels like twitter.

The Ushahidi team has been actively thinking of how a to validate and collate information in near real time — or as Erik Hersman puts it, crowd-source the filter. We are calling this mix of machine analytics + crowdsourcing initiative “Swift River” — and VoteReport India is the first instance where it will be implemented. The Indian Genereal Elections will be a first for the this initiative.

How can you help this effort? Well, I’m glad you asked 🙂

STEP 1: EVANGELIZE IT

Help us get the word out, Here is where we are on

• 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. Here is how you can send in reports:

1. SMS to 5676785
2. Email to report@votereport.in
3. Twitter with #votereport
4. Online via web form

STEP 3: VOLUNTEER

Please participate in this initiative and help us ensure a free, fair and transparent election process in India. To help out contact Vote Report India.

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