Transparent Chennai

Description

The Transparent Chennai project aims to empower citizens by creating and disseminating the information needed to understand citizen needs and to hold government accountable for its performance, and providing citizens the tools to engage in urban governance. Using low cost and low tech mapping and communication tools, the Transparent Chennai team collects and creates interactive maps, data, and research about the city and civic problems, works with citizens groups to make data that they need for their advocacy, and disseminates our work through the internet, email, publications, public meetings, and media coverage. The project uses technological tools to democratize the creation and availability of data about the city, and to capture informal knowledge about the city and its problems that can be documented and used for promoting greater government accountability.

What do we deliver?

The Transparent Chennai project provides both content and a service. Through our website, public meetings, publications, emails, and media outreach, we effectively deliver original research and content to residents of Chennai on issues of importance in the city. This includes information that makes life easier in the city like bus route maps, police booth, and public toilet locations. This also includes information that improves government accountability like providing electoral and administrative boundaries and contact information for agencies and individuals responsible for service provision in the city. We also provide information that can highlight citizen needs, and disparities in service and infrastructure provision in the city. Essentially, we provide the information that citizens can use to advocate for change. Most importantly, we provide the information in a format that people can understand easily, such as through interactive maps and short publications in both English and Tamil. We also provide an important service: we ease access to important civic data, and we work with citizens to actually create data about civic issues themselves. Government data is often difficult to access, and we file RtIs, visit government offices, and use our team to access data and to make it usable for residents. We also work closely with particular citizens groups or groups of volunteers to help them create the data needed for understanding specific civic problems or to increase accountability in a particular area or on an issue. Often, there is a great deal of informal or localized knowledge about civic problems, even where the government collects no data at all. Transparent Chennai has the tools to collect that data over time, aggregate it, and use it for evaluating the government performance. We also use low-tech tools and materials in addition to online and mobile tools that enable people from all socio-economic classes to participate in data creation.

Whom we deliver?

Residents of Chennai seeking information about the city Government officials with whom we share our data and research findings Citizens groups, residents, and volunteers with whom we work to produce data on issues important to them Journalists covering the city who use our research frequently in their reports Students interested in specific city issues and in learning and using mapping and new media techniques.

How is the project unique?

Transparent Chennai provides information on a variety of civic issues and sources from a range of government offices in one place. It provides a centralized place where people are able to access information about the city, and provides it in an interactive manner that enables people to understand civic issues, citizen needs, and government performance. Our project is unique in two important ways. Firstly, it is one of the first projects to actually capture informal and localized knowledge in such a comprehensive manner. We combine low-cost, easy-to-use techniques with a sustained outreach effort to enable people to contribute data to our database on civic issues that matter to them. For example, in our recent efforts at ward accountability, we found nearly 100 students and volunteers who were willing to use paper maps and test a mobile app that would enable them to mark piles of garbage that were found on the streets. Such a database of garbage locations gives us a more realistic assessment of the extent to which the government fails to meet demands for infrastructure and services from citizens, and how much more resources are required to meet these demands. Secondly, our project is particularly unique because we provide government data (obtained through RtIs, office visits, and general research) parallel to citizen generated data. Especially in a context like India, where much of the data about the social and economic context only covers the formal sector while most of the population lives and works in the informal or semi-informal sector, the ability to supplement government data with citizen generated data is extremely important. It helps to identify where there are gaps in records and where information needs to be collected in different ways.

Roadmap

Transparent Chennai hopes to create a city-wide movement to create the data required for accountability. We firmly believe that citizens have the power to create the data they need to hold the government accountable for providing services and infrastructure effectively. Through efforts like the Ward Accountability Experiment, we hope to reach out to a critical mass of city residents who will use our site and the tools that we provide to inform themselves about the city, its problems, to evaluate government performance, and to demand improvements and changes in government action. In the short term, we hope to continue and improve the work we are doing, including to increase the size of our research and outreach team, to publish high quality, data-supported research studies about the city and civic issues, particularly those issues that affect the poor, to engage with many more local groups and individual residents to create data on issues of importance to them, to increase direct participation on our website and through our mobile tools, to refine and improve the quality, quantity, and presentation of information on our website, and to effectively ensure that the information we are supplying and creating results in policy change and improved performance from the government. Over the medium-term in Chennai, we hope to begin working more closely with the government. Ideally, our model would encourage local government and municipal agencies and departments to increase the amount of information they provide to the public, to improve the formats in which they provide it, and to increase genuine citizen participation in their activities. We hope to be involved more closely in these efforts, and in fact, we have already begun discussions with the Chennai Traffic Police to solicit citizen participation in improving traffic management in certain key roads and junctions in the city. Over the long term, based on the model we are developing in Chennai, we hope to create and populate a series of Transparent City websites throughout the country, which enable the display of government data, allow citizens to contribute their own information, and empower residents to participate more effectively in urban governance.

Contact

Transparent Chennai, a project of the Centre for Development Finance, Institute for Financial Management and Research
Nithya V. Raman, Project Director
Transparent Chennai, Centre for Development Finance, c/o Institute for Financial Management & Research IITM Research Park Phase 1, 10th Floor #1, Kanagam Road Taraman ChennaiTamil Nadu 600113
URL/Website – www.transparentchennai.com