deepakar - 20 May, 2010 | Bangalore | Water | arghyam

Some notes from our freewheeling discussion with folks at Arghyam

Participants: Vijay, Deepak and Mrinalini from Arghyam. Manjari, Deepak and Neha

On Water Index

•  The feedback was that we should focus on a narrower scope (say, just collecting data on rainwater harvesting)
• If we are not able to get data from BWSSB directly are we going to take the RTI route? And if we do get data from BWSSB, will we be able to cross-verify it some way?
• Apart from collecting all the data, having an interface for smart queries might be a useful feature to build on Praja.

On Crowdsourcing

• Arghyam will be very interested to partner with Praja on any crowdsourced data collection effort.
• The folks had some useful insights from their two previous efforts on crowdsourcing. The first of their efforts was to distribute a Do-it-yourself kit for testing water for bacterial content (H2S test). This effort was a loosely structured pilot. The more concentrated effort came in their Lost Lakes campaign where they solicited amateur videos on the lakes of Bangalore. The learning from this was that sustained publicity and the involvement of mainstream media was important to ensure increased participation.
• Arghyam is also involved in a groundwater data collection project in Mulbagal. We could use their experience from that project to formulate our data models and collection strategies.
• They also offered to let us use their newsletter to garner publicity or to solicit feedback on our efforts

Action items

• Write an article describing the Water Index project and post on India Water Portal
• Share data that we get from BWSSB with India water portal.

Apart from that, Neha also agreed to

• rip their portal apart and send them feedback :)
• send them links to all the water-related discussions we have had so far on Praja.

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