From politics to business to society, we envision a more democratic world.

Vote Report India is a collaborative platform to enable Indian citizens to track election irregularities and monitor the performance of elected officials at national, state and local levels. Users contribute direct SMS, email, Twitter and web reports and the Ushahidi-based platform aggregates them on an interactive map, and distributes them via RSS and email/ SMS alerts. By crowd-sourcing the monitoring of the political process in India, Vote Report India aims to build civic engagement amongst India's youth and increase transparency and accountability in the Indian political process.

Build innovative mobile applications of the interactive Ask Your Lawmaker widget and extend functionality of the website so that:Citizens can question their lawmakers directly from their cell phones and vote for the questions they most want answered. CNC reporters in the US Capitol will be notified when users submit questions and again questions gets enough votes. With their direct accredited access CNC reporters get citizen questions answered, and upload the audio and text to the web and the original questioners’ cell phone for them to listen, read, comment on and share.

“My OpenCongress” already offers ways to track and comment on any bill, issue, or Member of Congress, as well as social networking and more. These changes will create new ways for users to customize the stream of updates they view and share on their profiles. First, Open Calais makes it possible to access rich metadata about tracked items. For example, if a user is tracking a Senator, data from the Open Calais API can inform you by automatically displaying associated organizations, facts, and events – “This Senator was appointed the Chairman of this committee on this date, click here to view more connections”. Second, Daylife makes it possible to access professionally-moderated news coverage of tracked items. For the example of a tracked Senator, the Daylife API can suggest related stories, articles, images, and topics – “Daylife Editors selected four news articles about this Senator in the past month, click here to view them”. Instead of following every news mention of a bill or issue (higher-volume), users could choose to receive only featured content (lower-volume). Our open-source development team welcomes input on these two API's, especially from their programmers, and suggestions on other data sources to consider. (Obviously, there are lots of viable options out there.)

People who read an article by an author, or visit content associated with a tag, will be plotted on a map of the US/world. THe mashup will plot where the readers of the content come from. We publish 1500+ articles a month and have over 55,000 articles, over 8000 tags, over 10,000 member writers we'll be able to use this with.Readers will even be able to see a map of who has looked at the same articles. Imagine you are thinking of moving to a new location. You take articles you've read and look at maps of where the readers come from. That might give you an idea of where you'll find like minded people.We're also going to be adding polling to the site shortly, so we'll be able to map responses to polls. Our polling system will be open to any member to use, so it will be easy for anyone to create a poll, then map the results. This will be invaluable for campaigns, causes, advocacy orgs... Then, we also collect demographic info, so we'll be able to add that layer to the mapping.