In Nepal, lack of information is a significant and everyday hurdle for the average citizen. Knowledge is a fiercely guarded good in our culture. And it inevitably resides behind the high walls and locked doors of the powerful. At GalliGalli, we seek to reverse this dynamic.
By making knowledge public, we will already be tearing down the walls and unlocking the doors. Even more powerfully, we will build tools which allow citizens themselves to collect and disseminate valuable information. GalliGalli’s experiment begins in two areas, public transportation and government services.
Today, the Kathmandu metro area has an extensive public transportation network which services most of the valley. Yet, there is no publicly available map of all the available routes and the corresponding fares. GalliGalli is working with several other players, to make this critical information publicly available through an interactive web app that draws on crowdsourced data from Open Street Maps. We are also thinking up ideas to magnify the power of the web app by bringing it to the wider public, through low-tech (such as text message based updates) and no-tech (like printed maps).
Understanding how to get government services can be similarly frustrating . There are clear guidelines and procedures which civil servants follow. Yet, these processes are rarely, if ever, laid-out in full for the public. As a result, it can take numerous visits and much confusion to do something as simple as renew a driver’s license. As with public transportation, GalliGalli believes the power of the crowd can be harnessed via a wiki to explain the established procedures. (We are using MediaWiki, the open source wiki product that was evolved from Wikipedia). Knowledge, we believe, is power. And the informed citizen is an empowered one.
Through this campaign and your support we want to raise the cash to sustain our operation for four months. In these months, we will be able to build up the technology and work with GalliGalli's online and offline communities to take our tools to citizens across the country.
