govcheck.net

Rishabh Manocha is the developer behind govcheck.net. Rishabh started govcheck.net to answer a simple question – ‘What are my elected representatives doing?’ While data existed on various websites published by Government as well as third parties he noticed that none of its is directly consumable by the people.

Through govcheck.net he was bringing data about the work being done by your elected representatives, from various sources such as the Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha and the Election Commission of India websites. By doing this, we hopes to allow our users to view data from a broader perspective, pick up on trends, analyse the direction the country is taking and much more. As and when he adds additional data (from the Census Beaureau of India’s website, for example) he hopes to increase users’ ability to find out more about their government and elected representatives and make a better decision the next time they step into a polling booth.

Rishabh feels that OpenCivic will go a long way to increase civic participation which is seriously lacking in India.

We are really excited to have Rishabh with us and more importantly his expertise from building govcheck.net. He is fairly active on twitter and you can follow him @rmanocha

askneta.com - Get Answers, Not Promises!!

Yesterday, at BarCampPune I met up with Shardul Mohite the co-founder of WeboniseLab who are working on AskNeta.com (a politician is called a ‘Neta’ in hindi language). Speaking to him on how they were collecting data for AskNeta.com I could instantly connect with their vows of visiting several government websites and scraping content through automated scripts. Many a times the data is available as an MS Excel files which again needs to be downloaded and formated for usage.

Next I shared the vision for OpenCivic with them and he instantly connected with it. Not only did he offer his unconditional support but wanted to use the OpenCivic API. So, as of now AskNet.com would become the first web service to consume data from the OpenCivic API.

We at OpenCivic are really happy that we could get together startups and people who have felt the same ‘itch’. You can follow Shardul on twitter @shardulmohite