I am trying to visualize the constitution of India to make it easy for myself. The first one would be of-course a word cloud. Might take a while to load. Click on the image if you want bigger one.
More readable one
I downloaded the PDF files from Govt site. I have uploaded the same to Scribd for easy access and sharing.
Looks like our constitution is very egoistic, speaks more about itself than its people/citizen :)
Well I have many reasons not to agree with Team Anna. But what I agree is their (or anybody’s) right to fight. Specially if its against a corrupt system. What raged me is tactics used by Government to kill the movement even before it started. And probably that is the reason I support this movement.
Arun Jaitely talks about the same in Rajya Sabha and I completely agree with him.
These days my work mainly involves around government data (or the data that I assume govt should provide). You must have already seen the open data initiatives by both USA (Data.Gov) and UK(data.gov.uk) governments. I am not sure how good or the bad the data is but the initiative as such is a great move. For that matter it is not just countries but the cities like London have opened up their data. I think its high time for democracies like India to open up the data. Well at least the govt bodies of so called silicon valley of India, Bangalore’s BBMP or GOK to begin with.
Imagine raw data you will get to play around, its programmers heaven. Imagine the kind of mashups we can build with election results and geo data. As of today even though we have some kind of data on-line. Its very distributed, not open and of course not developer friendly.
What we need today is an open data initiative, where GOI and state/local govts can publish data in a developer friendly format. Even though I am not an expert, by developer friendly I mean, open standard, online, search-able, semantic data. Unfortunately in India it might take years for Govt to come up with such a plan. So as active citizens, how can we force the govt to that? or should it be taken up by an NGO or Society? or should we the citizens start a simple community project of collecting and publishing data?
Btw as an interim solution I am bookmarking all the Govt related data on delicious with #open-data-india. Feel free to tag/comment more about available data.
Updates:
1. Paper on Open government data study: India is an interesting read. I was interviewed for this paper.
2. Check datameet.org for data enthusiasts and also google group for related discussions.
As promised I am starting the outfoscions series with Onze Technologies. With their first and primary product Latlong.in they are trying to decode the maps for the rest of us. Latlong tries to give you the information on the go, hence the best way is to deliver by SMS. But the biggest problem for delivering the route on the SMS is 160 character limit. Guys at Latlong came up with a plan of decoding the last ~5km route to destination. This is a brilliant idea considering most of the time users struggle in last five kilometers. Any detailed information from a known landmark in last five kilometers is the way we generally give directions to our friend. LatLong tries to do the same on sms.
You can start using by sending “help” to 90088 90088.
This Sunday I met them at their office. In fact I used their own service to reach their office. It was great fun talking to all the four (Sud, Rahul, Sairam and Pavaman) founders.
Here is an interview I did with them. I am not an interviewer as such. But I have tried to ask questions, which probably will help you know more about LatLong.in. Thank you Sud for taking time out.
Read the rest of this entry »
This is yet another long post. So give it time to load and take a big cup of coffee before start reading it. As most of you who follow me on twitter know that I am in Hyderabad. This Saturday me and my friend Achalesh decided to explore some parts of Hyderabad. We started with Golconda fort, it was great. In the evening we decided to visit old city for some chai.What else is better than char minar area for chai.
So we caught a shared auto and then bus to reach old city. As we started walking to wards char minar. We saw this beautiful structure unfolding.
It wasnt as big as I had thought. But never the less it was big and beautiful. Read the rest of this entry »
