Comments on: Tweet for Pune

By: Vasudev Ram

Vasudev Ram — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:13:10 +0000

This sounds like a really good idea, Navin and Anupam – having as many different organizational units as possible, whether in the public or private sector, use Twitter for broadcasting information that’s relevant and useful to the public at large. It’s of course well known that many individuals and organizations do tweet, but I think this vision of its use – by telecom companies, government departments, etc. etc., takes it to the next level.

- Vasudev

By: shirish

shirish — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:43:52 +0000

Hi all,
I have few more things which I feel need to be pointed out .

a. In the ward office link there is no shivajinagar ward office

b. A much better tweet and email could be in form of notices of when light or water is going to be cut in different areas.Is there such a service?

Looking forward to know if there is such a service.

By: Dipali Ekbote

Dipali Ekbote — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:58:27 +0000

I believe going with the market leader, Twitter makes sense. With so much talk already centered around twitter, it may be much easier to get new users to join on twitter rather than on the lesser-known alternatives.

By: navin

navin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:45:40 +0000

@skprasad pointed out via twitter that this not really an either-or proposition. There is nothing really preventing us from including tweets from twitter as well as identi.ca for these purposes (except for a slight increase in page loading time).

By: Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay Nene — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:20:27 +0000

The only reason why I believe something different than twitter could be considered is if identity management is required as well to tie the identities across multiple services. Otherwise twitter imho is the right choice. If identity management is reqd then the tool to use is not identi.ca but http://laconi.ca which is the software on which identi.ca implementation is based on.

By: Pravin

Pravin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:20:26 +0000

Hi Shirish,

Twitter has a huge user base. After all its not openness but the popularity matters.
Which newspaper you will like to read? the one having more local news or one which has environment friendly paper as raw material but with very less news?
Pune Goverance Wiki is striving to get userbase and if it can get userbase from sites like twitter its always good. See what happens when you search for “Aundh” at Twitter and at identi.ca
http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=1096942547&page=2&q=aundh
http://identi.ca/search/notice?q=aundh&search=Search

By: navin

navin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:38:39 +0000

Rakesh,
1. In general, it would be interesting to have the kind of mashup you are describing. (Or maybe joomla or drupal experts can cook up something like that using extensions.) If you, or someone else reading this, are interested in helping build something of that kind, please get in touch with me and we can start an effort.
2. Free hosting or lack thereof should not be a factor in any decision making, because hosting is so cheap these days that getting something hosted on our own is not a problem. For example I’ve donated hosting space for ciopune.in and I’m sure I can find more willing donors for initiatives like this.

By: Rakesh

Rakesh — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:11:11 +0000

Just came across this — pretty cool. I have often felt that a mashup of:
(a) Wikipedia like interface (for an ‘archival slowly evolving knowledge base’) edited by the community
(b) Something automated that essentially crawls news updates as well as tweets etc.
(c) Combined with an editorial blog for a community-nominated ‘owner’
would be a very useful combination. Say we have one for each district of India. So for each district or some other granularity there is a Wiki page, a blog, a tweets-page, an automated news page (something that can be built using the likes of BOSS at Yahoo for free) and so on.

There could be special subsections (just like news, tweets etc) even for updates on recent searchable district-based RTI Applications (an OCR module may be useful) and response threads as well as updates on NREGA scheme. The ease of uploading photos etc can be used further.

Wonder what folks think about this… One issue, it seems, may be that if we want free hosting then it will have to be in one of the silos of Wikipedia or Google Apps or whatever —

But the current Pune Governance Wikia is a promising start!

By: navin

navin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:26:40 +0000

Hi Shirish,
While open-ness is an important criterion in choosing a service like this, I think the primary consideration should be how useful it is to the end users. In this case, using identi.ca would be fairly useless (at least for a while) since there are really not enough people on identi.ca. Initiatives like the Pune Governance Wiki live or die on the basis of ease-of-use and usefulness. They are struggling to get visibility, and mass-acceptance. In my opinion, giving up some of the ideological high ground is necessary for survival.

That’s my personal opinion. I’m hoping others with differing opinions will respond here.

By: shirish

shirish — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:48:09 +0000

Hi there,
I would say why twitter and why not identi.ca . I have found identi.ca to be a much much better service as its fully open-source rather than twitter which is not. Point your browser and find out http://identi.ca/