Vote Now, Vote Wise.
Vaibhav Bhandari and team have been working on TheKarkhana for several months with aim of funding and shepherding startups with sustainable business models effecting local India. The most recent Karkhana venture - WiseVoter aims at creating a platform where citizens can collaborate to track information about their political leaders. You can visit the homepage of WiseVoter and can instantly query the database of all the politicians running for 2009 Lok Sabha elections and query to see how many of them are women, how many have a criminal record, what is the size of their assets, see the number of parties in these elections. The current data which powers WiseVoter was possible owning to work of organizations like NoCriminals.org, various websites tracking Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha like govcheck, homepages of various political parties and various other internet resources! The task of tracking politicians is a mammoth venture, and the data wont be complete and accurate until the citizens participate. WiseVoter is willing to challenge Indians to take this task and provides a mechanism to edit and change any factual information you see is wrong in the website right there! So if you come across a page describing a politician which has incomplete or wrong information just click on edit in form change it and save! This is truly a platform of the people, by the people and for the people - come join this movement - Vote Now, Vote Wise!
The core team of WiseVoter is Vaibhav Bhandari, Rob May and Eric Smith. Vaibhav started this project as a part of Karkhana initiatives, Kintan Brahmabhatt one of the Karkhana partners also helps with WiseVoter. Eric Smith is the user interface designer and has teamed up with Vaibhav on successful ventures like WalkMe. Rob May is software developer par excellence and is responsible for resourcing the data about various politician with various web crawlers from the internet.
We are constantly looking for volunteers. Our newest addition to the team is Astha Gupta and Kavita Kukday. Astha is focusing on adding more information on constituencies and coming up with an hierarchy of causes. Kavita is a journalist by profession and is helping us with public relations and writing the editing guidelines for the site.