Minutes from the TCON on 20th May.

[Lalatendu Dash]

Minutes from the TCON this morning. Please add anything if I may have missed. Thanks.

Making the portal effective, useful and popular

1. The portal will primarily be aimed at the poor and disenfranchised citizens in India who, unlike the voting averse middle class citizens capable of getting their governance issues sorted out using their 'contacts', do not have any way to make their problems heard.  
2. We need have a few cases as soon as possible where the portal enables fixing governance problems. Word of mouth generated by such successful instances is the best way to make this portal popular.
3. Among all the channels available for complain logging, SMS is probably going to be the key, as people from rural area may not have access to twitter, email and internet.
4. There is concern that the limited number of characters in an SMS may not be sufficient to describe the problem in detail.
5. We probably have to publish some guidelines/templates for the complain logging. This will help us in automating complain management process
6. Need to work on as much automation in the system as possible. This is going to need development work, which should not be much.
7. We need to find competent field volunteers asap, who could be individuals as well as groups.    

Telephone connection

1. We need to have a handset and telephone subscription as soon as possible. We are happy to share the cost of these to start with.
2. Someone in India needs to take up this work, and find out the details.  

Funding

1. There is going to be need for funding as we go along. We will need money for the costs that the field volunteers will incur (printing, mailing, following up etc). We will need money for having a better and robust two way SMS service that we want to have at some point. We will also need to have a better technical infrastructure for the portal.
2. We can explore the possibility of funding from govt. 
3. We are open to sponsorship from private organisations. In return, we can provide some advertisement space to these organisations (on the portal as well as in our correspondences with the complainant/groups)  

FTI support for CGOV

1. FTI has a member base that could be very helpful in providing field volunteering service. It will be formally approached for supporting this project.

[Sanjeev Sabhlok]

Sorry, have been very busy. Will try to do some work on CGOV today.

Here's a link that we could provide on CGOV:  http://myneta.info/ .

Kamal (by way of cc.) - do you know any of the ADR academics personally? It might be useful to get ADR involved in this project.

s

--
sanjeev sabhlok
Blog: http://sabhlokcity.com/

Facebook: http://facebook.com/sabhlok/

Freedom Team: http://freedomteam.in

[Sanjeev Sabhlok]

I've proposed the idea on FTI. Limited response so far. Will pursue further. Here's an article of interest:

http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/sbtf-usaid-partnership-on-poverty-alleviation-and-smarter-development/ 

[Lalatendu Dash]

Thanks Sanjeev,

My apologies I have not been able progress much with the Ushahidi configuration task that I have been doing. Have been busy in the last few days and it looks like it is going to be like this for the next few days. Will resume the work as soon as I get some time.

Regards,

Lala

[Lalatendu Dash]

Just wondering, if people still have interest in this? 

The idea of having this portal is fundamentally good.. and we have already spent considerable time and effort on this. Should we take this to a point where at least some value can be realized from it. 

I understand it is probably proving to be rather difficult to arrange field volunteers willing pick up complaints and follow up with the relevant authorities. Is it worth then to develop this portal as just for reporting purpose (where complainants report their complains and see it published on internet). We can add the field volunteering aspect when we have sufficient resources.

Thanks,

[Sanjeev Sabhlok]

Indeed that's the key problem. The other is that on FTI when I raised this issue there was no interest at all. Basically without ownership of a group of volunteers, this won't go very far.

Lala, it may be worthwhile raising this on FTI again, but in the meanwhile what you've suggested should be done: just reporting from the internet.

Even if it becomes a very poor cousin of what it was intended, it might become the seed of a longer term successful innovation.

Please note that I'm hopelessly stuffed with time constraints, and too many things are calling for my attention. I'll have to leave this to you and others on the team to proceed further.

s

[Soumik Bhattacharyya]

Why would people at all want to publish their complaints? Without
field volunteers this is certain to be stagnated! The people would
know that, so why would they just submit their complaint?

On Aug 5, 6:55 am, Sanjeev Sabhlok <sabh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Indeed that's the key problem. The other is that on FTI when I raised this
> issue there was no interest at all. Basically without ownership of a group
> of volunteers, this won't go very far.
>
> Lala, it may be worthwhile raising this on FTI again, but in the meanwhile
> what you've suggested should be done: just reporting from the internet.
>
> Even if it becomes a very poor cousin of what it was intended, it might
> become the seed of a longer term successful innovation.
>
> Please note that I'm hopelessly stuffed with time constraints, and too many
> things are calling for my attention. I'll have to leave this to you and
> others on the team to proceed further.
>
> s
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Lalatendu Dash <ldash...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Just wondering, if people still have interest in this?
>
> > The idea of having this portal is fundamentally good.. and we have already
> > spent considerable time and effort on this. Should we take this to a point
> > where at least some value can be realized from it.
>
> > I understand it is probably proving to be rather difficult to arrange
> > field volunteers willing pick up complaints and follow up with the relevant
> > authorities. Is it worth then to develop this portal as just for reporting
> > purpose (where complainants report their complains and see it published on
> > internet). We can add the field volunteering aspect when we have sufficient
> > resources.
>
> > Thanks,
>

> > On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Lalatendu Dash <ldash...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >> Thanks Sanjeev,
>
> >> My apologies I have not been able progress much with the Ushahidi
> >> configuration task that I have been doing. Have been busy in the last few
> >> days and it looks like it is going to be like this for the next few days.
> >> Will resume the work as soon as I get some time.
>
> >> Regards,
> >> Lala
>

> >> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Sanjeev Sabhlok <sabh...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >>> I've proposed the idea on FTI. Limited response so far. Will pursue
> >>> further. Here's an article of interest:
>

> >>>http://blog.standbytaskforce.com/sbtf-usaid-partnership-on-poverty-al...

[Sanjeev Sabhlok]

Agreed. So let's wait till FTI or someone grows big enough to take this to the people. Till then, this was a good experiment and we know the technology exists, but let's leave it here. We need people to get involved, but that's really close to impossible.