Sampad Swain points to this Election Page from Google which is an interesting mashup on the Lok Sabha 2009 Elections, in partnership with a bunch of organizations and groups like the Association For Democratic Reforms, HT Media, Indicus Analytics, Janaagraha Centre For Citizenship and Democracy (the Jaago Re folks), Liberty Institute, PRS Legislative Research

From Sampad’s post: “Some of the things you will find in the site are:

• Latest election news
• MP profiles
• Constituency statistics
• Candidate quotes
• Polling booth locations and more, all personalized to your location

Just specify your city or town, and get election information relevant to you. One of the interesting stats the site gives is the development work in each constituency from the last election.”

For more information on the Indian Elections, check out Global Voices Online’s ongoing feature – Indian Elections 2009.

Am not really impressed by all the hype around political parties like the BJP using social media to their advantage – perhaps I am biased against them, but I was aghast to see BJP ads being served at my blog, and had to block them. I was asked by a well-known blogger and social media analyst who’s views I really respect (and who will remain unnamed), to get involved in projects around digitizing the Elections. But I found myself really hassled by the fact that I could not retain my own objectivity. Here’s most of my response [by email]:

While I acknowledge some parties are busy putting up online campaigns etc – I do feel a lot of it is like spam and under the garb of development, pushing forward the Hindutva agenda.  I find myself unable to keep my own objectivity through all of this, and although I appreciate your analysis here, and a lot is based on actual fact, I still sensed a lot of BJP propoganda in there to be honest (am perhaps very biased myself).

This goes against my own personal political beliefs (I am very very anti-communalism), and I fully acknowledge that this inability to dissociate my own emotions and beliefs is my own failing.  What I’m trying to say perhaps not so clearly is that my fear with such a thing is around objectivity really.    If this sort of effort is going to help one political party (the ‘wrong’ one for me in this case, as they are the ones that seem more active online than the Independents or the Congress) I would hate that.  No amount of IT / Social Media /Techno smarts can take away my belief that its all to push ahead a Hindutva agenda.

So while I still feel its a great idea, I cannot somehow bring myself to be a part of this .

There are some great initiatives by civil society to get more people to the voting booths by providing them with information and know-how.  Here’s a list of Civil Society efforts, compiled at the Digital Election Wiki, around bringing about change by voting.

Civil Society: Voter Registration

• Jaago Re (Marketing Campaign by Tata Tea)
• Bangalore Voter ID
• Vote India

Civil Society: Transparency

• Association for Democratic Reform
• Public Interest Foundation
• No Criminals
• Smart Vote (Bangalore)
• Mumbai Votes
• Future CM (AP)
• Conversations on Elections through Gtalk/Jabber Chat – elections@askme.im

Civil Society: Ideation/ Collective Action

• My Idea (Marketing Campaign by Idea Cellular)
• Manifesto: Wisdom of Crowds
• Change India
• India Banao
• Praja

Here’s a very neat mashup of GoogleEarth and Twitter for ethnography (it’s in French). @thiteu sent me the link on Twitter.

This work is a simulation of a 3 dimensional Geography using GOOGLE EARTH and of a social signal using TWITTER in ethnography nowadays.

Cool? Yeah. Imagine Second Life sort of re-enactments of the whole world based on Twitter graffiti. Is seems like an extrapolation of what services like Brightkite and Qik are offering. Interesting possibilities to build into ethnographic research. They should be watching this space!