Vivek Srinivasan

About Vivek Srinivasan

I work with the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University. Before this, I worked with the Right to Food Campaign and other rights based campaigns in India. To learn more, click here.

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.

Corruption & Integrity Improvement Initiatives in Developing Countries: A book on corruption and anti-corruption initiatives by UNDP with case studies from different countries, along with a discussion of anti-corruption initiatives.

Helping Countries Combat Corruption: The Role of the World Bank: A World Bank publication outlining the measures advocated by the bank to combat corruption in bank funded projects, and in countries supported by the Bank overall.

iGovernment Working Papers – University of Manchester: Working papers on information technology for the government, produced at the University of Manchester.

“Mobile Vigeye” Complaint system by CVC India: A mobile application developed by the Central Vigilance Commissioner of India through which individuals can submit complaints to the commission. The application includes a facility for the user to record audio, video and also write notes in order to submit complaints. Sounds like an interesting application that could be put to imaginative use by citizens from whom bribes are demanded.

Open data catalogue: A spreadsheet containing links to websites around the world providing open government data.

Government 2.0 Taskforce, Australia: A task force set up by Australian government to examining ways of making proactive disclosure of digitised information, to promote digital innovations in government, and promote online engagement.

Google SMS Channels: An SMS based newsletter service where subscribers can opt in to receive SMS messages and free messages can be sent by the publishers of these lists. This can be a great tool to use for those involved in monitoring of village level expenditure, etc.

Access Info Europe: Access Info is a leading organization working to promote the right to information. This website provides a good source of information on policy and legal challenges to access to information in Europe.

Project Open Data: Project Open Data is an online collection of code, best practices, and case studies developed to help agencies adopt the framework presented in the White House memorandum on open data policy. The website has a very useful set of tools, policies, challenges and other materials for those working on open data policies

Common Core Metadata for Open Data: A technical document on creating a common vocabulary for the datasets released by various agencies to the public, so that the information is easy to compare across datasets.

Open Data Policy Guidelines – Sunlight Foundation: A set of detailed guidelines on values that open data policies should incorporate prepared by the Sunlight Foundation, the leader in the field.

The Popolo Project: A collaborative project for building international open government data specifications relating to the legislative branch of government, so that civil society can spend less time transforming data and more time applying it to the problems they face. A related goal is to make it easier for civic developers to create government transparency, monitoring and engagement websites, by developing reusable open source components that implement the specifications. Although the data specification is designed primarily for open government use cases, many other use cases are supported.

Open Data & RTI: An international symposium that posed the question of whether Open data is a complementary concept or if it imposes restrictions of Freedom of Information. The page has the podcast of talks by legal scholars discussing new legal developments in Europe on this subject.

White House Open Data Policy: A short note outlining The White House’ open data policy issued on May 2013.

Communications & IT – United States Access Board: US Access Board creates regulations for equal access for people with disabilities. This page provides provisions pertaining to equal access in the domain of ICT.