Démocratie et scrutin

We have assembled an extraordinary and talented group of full and part time staff, and a National School Climate Council, as well as an amazing and invaluable Board of Trustees which offers us a wide-range of expert guidance. Leading our research and evaluation team is Amrit Thapa, PhD. Amrit received his PhD in Economics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. He will design and lead all of our evaluation efforts in collaboration with Jonathan Cohen, PhD, President of NSCC and Adjunct Professor in Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

1.Scaling up moderation: Moderation requires time and commitment, often difficult to sustain at no cost. Moderators have to verify news reports with the community and this requires training. We plan to distribute the task by having separate channels per language, each with a paid moderator. To sustain this, communities could eventually contribute to support the moderator.
2. Call costs: To popularize the service, we began calling users back after they leave a missed call. We are reducing this cost by setting up efficient call routing and encouraging users who can afford it to pay for their own calls.

We envision an upsurge in the number of people in India with access to the Internet and that media will evolve to this new consumer model. The primary mode of information consumption and exchange will be the mobile phone. By being well connected to the community at the forefront of the adoption curve in rural and semi-urban India, we feel that we are uniquely positioned to create the maximum impact

Given that smartphone penetration in rural India is set to shoot up, with companies like Micromax and Lava bringing out feature and smartphones at mass market prices. Irrespective of whether voice gains traction, we will be targeting that wave early on to find other applications for the same platform.
By making the project open source, we are ensuring that innovation will continue from the community regardless of our success

We are currently grant and donation funded. However, in the long term, we see a possibility of a revenue stream from a hosting service model, where in communities interested in running an audio platform will be able to sign up for an account and manage their own content from an administration interface. We could also supplement this revenue stream by providing paid training programs in citizen journalism and audio content management. A tertiary revenue stream could be advertising and content syndication, where in mainstream media could sponsor some citizen journalists in an area that they are interested in.

Our core funding is through the Knight International Journalism Felowship Program, managed by the International Center for Journalists. We aditionaly work with other organizations at a program level basis, e.g. Ministry of Culture’s Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti recently hosted one training program with us and we have another lined up at the end of September with another agency
We also have many grasroots partners including Sitara and Prasoon. Our grasroots partners help mobilize citizen journalists and folow up on isues raised by the comunity.

We invite people with a passion for empowering communities through technology to work with us, particularly individuals and organizations interested in partnering with us on technology, to develop new features for the platform, multilingual people who speak at least one language from the region to moderate and translate messages and finally people interested in following up on messages in action.

A lack of development resources meant that, previously, an open source newsroom software was not a possibility. Any resources the organisation had were invested into the development of Newscoop which already had professional users. Sourcefabric was launched in late April 2010 with generous start up funding, which allowed us to plan our core activities well into the future and begin Superdesk development.

If traditional media companies, and especially mid-size or small ones, are to survive, they have to be ready for any eventuality in the industry. Superdesk opens up management thinking to emerging platforms. It makes any media operation multi-platform by default (with nearly unchanged staff). It increases productivity, decreases processing time of news events, provides an ultimate insurance policy against diminishing returns on any platform (e.g. print) and taps the full content-generation capacity of a media organisation.

Firstly, interoperability with Sourcefabric's other open source software products for media organisations will be built into Superdesk as standard, meaning that should the idea fail to gain traction, our other software would 'inherit' the features.

Secondly, given that the codebase is open source, the project could also be given over to 'the community' to maintain - allowing adaptation and improvement to take place on that basis.

Thirdly, once the product is developed, enterprise-level modules and features can be developed for major media, meaning that even if wide-scale adoption does not take place, project-by-project integrations can take place, with appropriate resources being budgeted for in a bespoke fashion.

Sourcefabric and Superdesk will have three key revenue streams:

1) Start-up funding. Generous start-up funding in April 2010 has allowed for dramatic expansion over three years and the implementation of a business plan to maintain financial sustainability.

2) Partnerships and donors. Sourcefabric is working with a number of partners throughout the world who fund specific media projects. This funding is often used to develop the tools being used (like Superdesk) and then the improvements are committed into the public versions of the software.

3) Software as a Service (SaaS). Paid hosting and support for our software will become a significant revenue stream in 2012. Our first SaaS programme's infrastructure will pave the way for Superdesk SaaS and launches in October 2011.

Sourcefabric was formerly known as CAMP (the Center for Advanced Media-Prague), initially founded by the Media Development Loan Foundation in 1998. It is now an autonomous organisation that has partnerships throughout the word with various donors, NGOs and media development bodies. Recent project partners include the Open Society Initative For West Africa and IREX Media. A private Swiss foundation is providing Sourcefabric with its core funding currently.

Sourcefabric has a team of over 35 employees based in offices in Prague, Berlin, Cluj, Minsk, Toronto and Guatemala. Their roles range from development, to quality assurance, to administration, to client liaison, project management and communications.

All have significant experience in their field, many have been involved in journalism previously - all are passionate and dedicated to supporting independent media worldwide.

Sourcefabric would be committed to becoming active in the Changemakers space and would commit significant resources in the form of media expertise, global journalistic and news enterprise contacts, collaborative research or idea-sharing and mentorship for young developers or journalists interested in this field.

In return Sourcefabric hopes to gain further exposure for the work it is doing, and specifically for Superdesk, access to a greater range of news organisations that could benefit from the project. Funding, collaboration and networking opportunities with other NGOs, media projects and news agencies would be welcomed.

From the beginning, the Cidade Democrática has been well received and raised a lot of support and recognition. Our constraint is finding ways for the 2nd phase of development (programming) platform. For this we are detailing the development project with a couple of programmers and we will submit this project (with a total budget around $300,000) to foundations who seek to promote research.

The citizen is the new creator of messages which changes everything. The web, through social media, widgets and applications gives the young Generation Y a lot of power and is designing a future where information will be online all the time and on cell phones and other devices. We will be the editors of collaborative solutions for public spaces.

We have already evolved a lot. We started thinking that we would sell analytical reports from the vast amount of information that the platform would receive. We went through models of actions in partnership with business and today we are having success in projects with public servants that empower citizens on how the web can help resolve public issues. We will continue working in this vein. The next step is to create open-source platform from our code for others to use.

Today we sell a package that includes Digital City web-citizenship workshops in which we train participants in how to use the web; web-citizenship strategies, in which we design a plan, train and accompany the participants so they succeed in using the web for public affairs, and a portal customized using the information architecture of Cidade Democrática. For the initiative to make its code open source and move to the 2nd stage of development of the tool, we have submitted proposals to foundations for research support and we will utilize crowdfunding platforms to raise at least 10% of the total.

There are currently more than 20 projects that comprise a complex ecosystem of web-citizenship that converge and complement each other. We use the network to offer more complete solutions and to strengthen our work. (www.webcidadania.org.br)
Partner organizations that hire us and / or offer solutions together are: São Paulo library, Catraca Livre, Cities for People, Educartis Aha! School, Avina Foundation, Faria Lima Municipal Foundation, Green Mobility, Movement for Conscious Voting, Viração Magazine, Movimento ViraJovens, Thacker and The Hub.

In addition to the two hubs (connectors for the project with partners and society), one with a profile of project management and the other projects coordinator, we have a a social media analyst, an administrative and financial analyst and a full time developer, we count on collaborators that offer workshops and partners who “sell" the project. Today we need a development team (4 people) dedicated to the 2nd stage and one more person to make the sale and delivery of "Digital Cities" packages. Our doors are open, but we have not been able to meet all of th

We work based on collaboration, thus, more or less all we have, being what we value, we also need. Our network of contacts is very broad and we often recommend people for stories in the media, jobs and opportunities in events, etc. Because we have an intense media platform and social media we use, we can provide space, but also greatly appreciate new spaces where we can talk about our project. The same goes for research and information. Recently, we completed a study in partnership with Avina on how the web can help in social causes. Ideas are always welcome and our work is influenced by recommendations. What is most important at the moment are financial resources for the aforementioned programs and talents to work as a network.

The most important barrier has been the access to financial resources that allow us to develop our technological platform. Our young age and the fact that it was a different and not yet proved model, made it very difficult to find funding in the early stages.

However, due to our past success, we have been able to establish strong alliances with several branches of the Federal Government, and the project is now widely recognized by many NGO’s and others agents involved in social development, including private companies; the demonstrated success creates many opportunities for future financing.

The next decade will certainly bring new tools and access to a greater population. We are constantly looking for these in order to add them to the platform, and build on the existing infrastructure so that more people can get involved. Yo Propongo is already proving to be an efficient channel between governments and their citizens, if it continues this way, it will fuel change through involvement and better communication.

If our solution doesn't work as we expected, we can adapt our data analysis processes as well as our civic engagement methods to other applications such as marketing, open forums and polls, or a lower scale of cityhalls. There will always be a need of knowing what a population wants (for private or public purposes), and our tool is efficient gathering that information. It may be publicly or privately financed.

The relationship is becoming much stronger with the Federal Government, and it is becoming a more secure and important source of funding. Despite this growing relation, we have looked for other ways to find funding.

Up until today, we have depended on corporations and the national government to provide our funding, since we didn’t have the necessary legal structure to receive tax deductible donations. However, in the past few weeks we have completed this process, and we are now able to receive donations that are tax deductible, which will allow us to find financing from many new sources.

We have built a partnership with the Federal Government to bring the project to the locations when it is needed the most, we have been in Juarez and are working on taking it to the whole country next year. We have partnered with the Mexico City Gov and a number of NGO's to implement the ideas gathered by the platform. We are creating a network of groups to further expand the project, in reach and technologically. Since its creation we have worked with ThinkTanks and researchers to create a solid model and implement the knowledge of similar projects.

The team is divided in three groups. The eight co-founders of Yo Propongo that make the general strategies and take care of direction of the whole team. In the second group are the students that are making community service with us, they come from the best universities of México City. In this semester we have more than 30 people in our community service program. The third group is made out of volunteers that support the Yo Propongo because they believe in it but they don't have a rigorous scheme of work. In this semester we have more than 20 volunteers.

The project is sustentable in all its stages but it increases it's potential if it gets more investment and support in marketing and media. At this moment we have enough human capital, creativity, ideas and we have also developed a wide network of followers, never the less, to accomplish our goals for the next years we need a lot of support in publicity, media, investment and the continuous increase of our network.

Limited serious public engagement with the role of citizens in a democracy in India. While we rightfully blame politicians for various failures, we do not make it easy for our MPs and MLAs to represent us.

Limited Indian sources of funds and support on democracy.

I see more and more democracy coming in the space of internet based media. I also see more questions being raised about the credibility and independence of news channels and news papers, esp the corporate media.

The solution will make use of the internet, esp blogging to enhance transparency and accessibility of various discussions/surveys that happen during electoral campaigns through the project's intervention.

Possibly will focus more on the public library aspect of the work and reduce electoral engagement. Hence the linkage will more be with academic and research institutions and less with politicians and parties.

The funding for this work will come from three sources in the medium terms- 1) NGOs who are nurturing the civic groups looking for further capacity building 2) local citizens who see value in having a few citizens make elections more meaningful by doing specific ground work and 3) political parties who use the election related services

The initial partnership would be done with NGOs, Micro Finance Institutions and other loose or organized citizen mobilizations. Most of the poor in India do have their own networks with politicians and political parties.

We will not be partnering with political parties in this initiative as that would compromise its neutral character

People who have deep faith in democracy, who believe that ordinary even illiterate citizens can and should participate at the highest level of decision making, who can interpret laws and parliamentary proceedings, who would be humble and open to learning

We can offer knowledge around Indian democracy and its functioning.