How Open Standard (like UNICODE) is more democratic than proprietory standard
We wish to contribute our bit to enable people to use indian language technology for an important democratic activity i.e. access to voter lists. We shall look at the situation in Maharashtra to start with. Maharashtra is typical case like any other state in the country. Perhaps rolls here are better maintained and perhaps the authorities here are genuinely interested in sharing the information with the public.
Ultimate objective:Through the voterlist, we wish to strengthen the hands of the CEC, the statutory body orchestrating the great dance of democracy . We also believe that the citizen must be given due rights and respect as compared to waht the official machinery can presently afford. With due respect to the genuine desire on the part of dedicated bureacrats and lower level staff, the very size of the problem is beyond non-computer interface. The irony is that data has been computersied and is in indian language but there is no provision in the sysytem for public interface in indian language. We believe that GNU/Linux free software , localised in all indian languages and unicode standard alone provides an affordable universal interface. It will provide access to people who wish to work with proprietory software just as well as those who wish to use free software. Voterlist will be only a starting point to ultimately generalise the indian language enabled e-governance initiatives.
Challenge:Considering nation as the unit of consideration, we humbly challenge anyone to provide a more affordable solution (TCO ) and we shall agree to advocate the same.
Voterlist : restrictive access: The voter lists are composed in indian languages, for example in marathi in maharashtra, and stored in databases. The storage has been traditionally in ISCII standard. It was and is a great strategic decision to keep the data in font-independent national standard called ISCII. However, the data has to be inevitably converted into some vendor-specific font-encoding like ISFOC or some such for any display. This dependence on proprietory software may have been inevitable in the past. No more. In order to not expose data for misuse, and hence to restrict access to data that can be manipulated, as a policy , the (electronic) data files are not published by CEC.Hence the rolls have been often converted into .pdf and are displayed on the website. And it is not easy for ordinary lay user to extract the text out of them without using specific tools. It is possible to search a name or string from given lists only after a lot of engineering. People have used tools and have extracted the text from PDF Files. People could do so for some PDF files but could not do the same for others. These text files can be read by enabling the editor with the true type fonts which are given on the election commission website. If you had only PDF files , you cannot download any info from screen, even if your booth name is there. You are thus not able to cut-paste from the screen and write a letter to the election official that your name is wongly written and hence may be so corrected . Unfortunately the indian languages contents in the above files would require some proprietary software to input any amendment.
Citizen-friendly access: If however the same data were in open public standard like unicode ( another font-independent standard , derived heavily from ISCII , but with ease of multi-linguality and with international acceptance in all new Operating systems) , and if the policy of the CEC allowed it to be shared , persons would be able to download data from files and use the data to compose their own letters, etc. Essentially , if CEC decides to share the data ( of course with appropriate security checks and limits to access) , it would be imperative to shift to standards that can be accessed without prorietory software. We feel that public information such as voter lists must be in formats which follow open public standards and must be available for amending and interacting without any expenditure or binding with a closed software system of a specific vendor. It is of course subject to the law of the land as to how much access is given to lay citizen. But even if an official in a taluka place wants to make some amendments and wants to submit the same to higher authority everyone may not have the same software all over. The officers may have to depend on some vendor . And you can imagine how difficult it is at district or taluka level government office to get a sanction on the nick of the time for expenditure on software. access to free software will ease these problems. Without this, a citizen may have to suffer. This may be due to two reasons: 1> due to non-fluency ( technical reason) of data i.e non-standard data and its dependence on some vendor specific software. 2> Dependence on commercial concerns( licenses, copyright, cost) all originating from the first technical reason.
Above all, political parties whose job it is to educate voters and facilitate voting are deprived of the information without a high threshold.
We wish to remove the technical reason so that organisational obstacles to citizen's rights are minimized.
Ingredients of democratic technology:
FLUENCY: What will make the data so easily fluent. If the data are in standard form . Unicode is such a standard and luckily both state and central governments have accepted the same as future direction. All e-governance projects will most likely be funded for conversion from older standards or non-standards to unicode.
CONVERSION: We have converted the content from the nonstandard font-encoded format to the standard unicode format and put the same on 'voterlist' page of our website. You can judge from the snapshots what can a citizen do with voterlists. But if you interact with us, we may be able to give even better idea of what citizen-interfaces are possible.
INTRA-INDIAN MULTI-LINGUALITY:We have also converted the marathi files into gujarati and put up the same. This is only to prove that interlingual translatability is not exclusive to ISCII but even unicode can achieve the same.
SEARCH:We have also searched for names in the given text files and database file shown through snapshots the kind of search that can be obtained.
SUPPORT on MULTIPLE ENVIRONMENT: We are aware that citizens have a large variety of computer environment i.e. variety of operating system and variety of application enabling them with indian languages sometimes needs extra efforts or additional software, fonts etc.
COMPARATIVE TABLE :To the best of our resources, we have tried and tabulated some possible configuration and different capabilities that these configuration have. These will guide the users to enable themselves to be able to view and interact with the voter lists to exercise their democratic right.
