Bharat Rakshak

Dear Friends,

What is sousveillance? Sousveillance is when the citizens place the government under surveillance, it is the opposite of surveillance, where the government watches the citizens. For the past two years I have been working on a platform to enable real time sousveillance of all government issued documents. I have phase 1 of the project complete and I will let you know the link at the end of this passage. First I want to share with you the process through which I plan to validate the information being given to the citizens using the power of crowd sourcing.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments regarding what I'm trying to do here.

I am developing a platform to create an aggregate repository of all Indian government issued RTIs. We are working on making these searchable and easily reachable to the common man. However I am currently not a resident of India, but live in California, so I was hoping if you could give me some guidance / feedback on optimizing the system I'm building for rapid turn around time for verifying government issued documents.

Currently the pipeline consists of an RTI inquirer issuing a question to the RTI public information officer. In return, they will get a response, that response is shared with our framework.

What I intend to achieve is to extend that framework to start crowd sourcing people in India to verify these government documents. This project is strictly philanthropic and is a non-profit based initiative. Essentially I am looking for volunteer coders / citizen journalists to facilitate the verification process. In addition I am also looking to integrate with various social networks which are actively debating regarding Indian politics.

Perhaps we can work together to essentially streamline the system and formulate a process to hold the government accountable. Any help in this regard is greatly appreciated.

Currently the RTI's are ingested by our system with Optical Character Recognition, then they are geolocated on a map of India. In addition the keywords that are generated from the OCR serve as keywords to make the RTI searchable. I basically want to create a force multiplier, using the Indian populace as the workforce to verify the RTI documents that are issued.

Any suggestions regarding a pragmatic and efficient process would be great.

Cheers,
Sravan

Posting the link to the site here: http://raaci.in <-- Rapid action against corruption in India.

Please speak up if you want to get involved, this is cutting edge stuff and is a very cool project.

P.S. Right now we have search and the map functionality working:

http://raaci.in/map
http://raaci.in/search (keywords: india, mumbai, delhi, forest, university, etc...)

We are working on digitizing the RTI's using algorithms.

What's missing is the social aspect and we need boots on the ground to verify the information. Since the RTI's are geolocated, it is very easy for someone to find information to verify based on where they live. This information might be more contextual to you and tangible to validate. I plan to add mechanisms through which information can be validated.

For example an RTI can have a bunch of datapoints attached to it. Other people can now tag each datapoint as true or false and optionally leave a comment. A visitor to the website can bring up the stream of information regarding that RTI and also review the feedback from other users. They can choose to contest that feedback or support it.

But essentially the one trait that will win out is the fact that truth is consistent and false information isn't. So with enough samples the datapoints will eventually reflect the truth.