Daily Archives: July 23, 2014

Apps4Africa: A contest to build mobile based technologies that could be used for social purposes in Africa

Edward Tufte and Graphics Press: Edward Tufte is a well known political scientist who specialises in communicating information in creative ways using data visualization.

Public Database Indexing Guidelines: North Carolina is mandated by law to maintain an index of all electronic public records with description of available data. This is a guideline prepared by the State government to prepare an index of the databases

Implications of registering, tracking, profiling by Usha Ramanathan: Usha Ramanathan argues that UID should be seen in the context of NATGRID that will enable security agencies to track personal information including travel, finance, immigration, etc. It infringes on privacy and creates scope for misuse. At a time when routine acts of life of the poor are criminalised, such projects can condemn large sections of the population to a life of perpetual illegality.

Anti-Corruption Resources: Transparency International UK’s page with links to articles and websites of other organisations working on corruption. There are detailed case studies from different countries on anti-corruption measures.

The Bulgarian Anticorruption Portal: Media coverage of corruption stories, anti-corruption initiatives in Bulgaria and links to research on corruption from across the world.

Annual conferences on IT and politics: Annual conferences on information technology and politics organized through American Political Science Association.

Electronic Journal of E-Government: Publishes research on topics relevant to the design, evaluation, implementation and management of e-Government/e-Governance, e-Democracy, e-Participation and other dimension of this field of study

Journal of E-Government: It is “a new professional journal focusing on the application and practice of e-government in its broadest sense

Sunshine Review: Sunshine Review is a non-profit organization dedicated to state and local government transparency in the United States. The Sunshine Review wiki collects and shares transparency information and uses a 10-point Transparency Checklist to evaluate the content of every state and more than 5,000 local government websites.

Open Government Guide: A complete compendium of information on every state’s open records and open meetings laws in the United States. Each state’s section is arranged according to a standard outline, making it easy to compare laws in various states.

Government Records Branch of North Carolina: Contains detailed formats, guidelines and other information on public records and its management that is useful for RTI activists.

Articles Questioning Aadhaar: A collection of articles that are critical of the Unique ID Project, as the very name of the website suggests.

Articles on the UID Project: A collection of articles that are largely critical of the Unique ID Project.

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Unique facility, or recipe for trouble?: Article by Jean Dr

UIDAI’s not-so-‘clean’ partners and their tainted executives: Argues that one of the contractors has a long-line of ex-CIA officials, including George Tenet. Questions if surveillance information should be available to private companies, and to foreign ones at that.

Aadhaar software locked in with

Human Rights Project in the Cyberspace:

A Unique Identity Bill by Usha Ramanathan: Elaborates Human Rights, Civil Liberty and technological criticisms advanced on the UID Project and argues that the bill introduced in the Parliament of India on UID does not address the concerns that have been raised.

Not all that unique by Reetika Khera: UID has limited scope for reducing corruption, even if it works as intended; but as things stand. Development and reduction of corruption are used as a smokescreen for what is mainly a project driven by security establishment and corporate interests, argues the author.