1. Full name
| Salman Latif |
2. Global Voices sections to which you contribute
| GV in English |
3. Publication date of your latest post or translation
| Date: – 10/11/2012 |
4. Title of project
| Crowdsourcing electoral violence data |
5. Project representative (person who will sign award agreement and receive funds)
| Salman Latif |
6. Describe the proposed project as clearly as possible in five sentences or less
| The project aims at building a system which would let people report incidents of violence at different polling stations across Pakistan during 2013 elections. This reporting will be done in real-time and the resulting map will be displayed online, while also notifying the Election Commission of Pakistan. |
7. What aspect or need of Global Voices does your project address?
| Global Voices essentially strives to enable a simple thing: power to people. This project sets out to do exactly the same, though within the narrower scope of 2013 elections in Pakistan. |
8. How would the project further Global Voices’ mission?
| It would let people have their say during 2013 elections in Pakistan, highlight the frequency of incidents of violence to an international community and in turn, lead to a better transparency. |
9. What is innovative about your project?
| The fact that we wish to link it with telecom services and let people report incident of violence in real-time. Currently, no such mode of crowdsourcing election data exists in Pakistan. |
10. Which section of Global Voices would your project most benefit (if applicable)?
| GV Advocacy |
11. How would the wider GV community utilize and/or participate in your project?
| The wider GV community can keep an eye on the data shelled out by the project and possibly bring it to the attention of the international community, and international observers, by highlighting it in their posts. This would assert pressure on the local authorities to not indulge in rigging. |
12. List the other GV community members, if any, who will be actively working on the project. Please specify what role each person will play in the development of the project.
| Annie Zaman Kumail Ahmed |
13. What additional resources or expertise, if any, would you need to complete the project?
| Our costs, detailed below, will be significantly trimmed if we get: Web developer, web designer, someone good with data analytics tools who can possibly help us in training the volunteers. |
14. Describe the prospects for sustainability/continuation once the innovation grant funding ends
| The funding is essentially required to build up a system to collect real-time data from voters and create an online portal to present it. Once the elections are over, the project will not exactly be functional, except that it could be used to create similar other crowdsourcing projects related to social issues. |
15. Please specify the timeline for the project, from start to finish
| Both the data-gathering mechanism and system as well as the online portal will be developed in first half of April and tested during the second half. In May, the system will be kickstarted into action as the elections draw near. |
16. Provide a detailed budget of up to US$5,000 for project costs. (Please try and present as accurate a budget as possible: applicants are encouraged to submit budgets for less than the maximum amount as smaller grants allow us to fund more projects)
| The budgetary details are, at best, estimates: $1500 – for PCs and the accompanying UPS, given the power scarcity in Pakistan $1000 – logistics for GV members and volunteers to travel to election sites, get feedback, interviews and discern indications of violation at different polling stations $500 – to bring together an online portal which will display the data. We’re trying to get web developer/designer folks on volunteer basis but that is proving rather difficult. $1000 – Expenses for a few training sessions we intend to do to ready the volunteers for the project before we launch it. |