Thoughtscapes: June 2009

It’s already over a month of the new government in India. With less than 60 days to go for the first 100 days everyone is waiting for the first signs of initiatives for good governance.

What can the government do in the next 60 to establish a track for good governance?

Here are some of the ideas I’ve been sharing along with the IT Vision for the Next Prime Minister that I wrote earlier in the year.

Develop official tweeters in every Ministry to broadcast public information and event reminders
Implement Google Calendars across government for every "Office of Government" and “Project of Government” and create a common interface to access them across government
Implement Google Maps or better still Sadak Maps tracked through a mysql database to track all budget heads (and projects) at every budget level (local, state, national)
Implement a National Governance Wiki, along the lines of Giki, to build inclusive, open dialog for good governance. Particularly seek collaboration of all stakeholders for creating development agenda and track project implementation across the nation
Implement a demography wiki from Census of India database linked with Sadak Map
Implement a Survey of India map based wiki for the Land, Geological, Zoological, Botanical, Archeological surveys (for an example see the website of CIO, Pune city)
Design an educational wiki for the CBSE curricula for all teachers to register and contribute to and all students to discuss on discussion pages
Create a Sadkamap linked Giki as visioned in BeyondVoting to build a development vision for the constituencies that its representatives can track
Develop open-source secure community-card system as a person and property level information system. For a description of the idea see One-India Cards. See Life with Punecards for a description of the difference such a card can make to peoples lives in a city or a village.