India is currently the largest democracy. In the 2004 election to the Lower house of Parliament (national) alone there were 5435 candidates. Add to this candidates standing for the election to various state assemblies in the 28 states of India. Thus, elections in India are events involving political mobilisation and organisational complexity on an amazing scale. Although, the Election Commission of India does its due by publishing a lot of this data on its website in the form of PDF’s and download able MS Excel files – the people are largely untouched as the only consumable information that reaches them is through TV and print media which in India could be influenced.

OpenCivic Logo

OpenCivic is a movement and a set of open standards and APIs to liberate this civic participation related data in a machine readable and re-mixable form that will allow developers and visualizers to interact with this critical data and build engaging applications over it in India.

OpenCivic will manifest itself in the form of locally flavored websites like TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow from mysociety.org which will consume the services of the OpenCivic API to post local targeted updates to users based on their preferences through web and mobile.

OpenCivic liberates critical civic participation related data and makes it usable for developers and visualizers to build locally targeted applications. Through the OpenCivic API we can build social applications that leverage the geo-targeting to update users on their preferred channels of update.

Eg 1: A mobile application that updates users whenever a bill is introduced in the Parliament that affects their neighborhood.

Eg 2: A website that allows users to find information of their local representative and raise issues or concerns.

Eg 3: A website that allows users to read the profile and historical background of candidates standing for the election and make an informed choice.

By making this critical data accessible to developers and visualizers through a uniform RESTful API, OpenCivic crowd-sources the building of consumable civic participation related web and mobile applications for the people.