An app to report civic issues

CHENNAI: The Ward Accountability Experiment - a pilot project of Transparent Chennai involving college students and citizen groups to use low-cost and easy mapping and survey methods to create records of local needs - went mobile on Saturday.This week, the volunteers tested a new smartphone application that enables this kind of information to be collected on a mobile phone. Developed by Next Wave Multimedia, a developer based in Chennai, the application captures location information automatically using GPS. Users can then input details like size of garbage pile, or nature of the footpath problem, and also upload photographs, video or audio files. All this information will immediately appear on the website of Transparent Chennai.As smartphones become affordable, they have become ubiquitous, and have the potential to be used as a tool for crowd-sourcing the information needed for improved government accountability. The initiative covers problems — piles of garbage, water logging, poorly maintained public toilets and broken sidewalks — that are easily experienced, but difficult to quantify and remain informal, as the government does not record them systematically. Nithya V Raman, Project Director of Transparent Chennai, says, “The public are the ones who live with these problems every day. Who better to map the problem areas than them?”According to Nithya, the main aim of the experiment is to “capture the localised information about civic problems that are not collected by the government and use that information to encourage elected representatives to make use of it to improve conditions.” With detailed data, claims of the citizens cannot be refuted or ignored, she says.Once the data is collated, the candidates for councillor of Ward 176, residents of the ward and general public will be invited to a public meeting on October 8. The implications of the findings will then be discussed. Candidates will be invited to make a commitment in improving conditions in the ward.“We hope to have tool kits available online to enable the public to gather such information on their own,” Nithya adds. The tool kit can be used to identify and collect data about one specific issue, or cover a number of issues plaguing the area.