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Unhabitatyouthfund
Please give a short description of the applicant organization’s mission (max 50 words)
ChaloBEST is an multi-disciplinary collaboration of developers, designers, researchers and activists dedicated to public transit and sustainable mobility in Mumbai and Indian cities. Our mission is to make transit information available via web, SMS, smartphones and print media using public databases, community information, and free and open source software (FOSS).
Do young people aged 15-32 years take part in the governance of the organization and the management of its activities? If yes, please describe how: (Max 50 words)
All of our funded work to date has been performed by students, part-time contributors and hackers in their late twenties and early thirties. ChaloBEST is managed through consensus-based decision-making on our mailing list, code repository and issue tracker. All team members are party to a memorandum signed in January 2012.
Does the project specifically target disadvantaged young people aged 15-32 years? If yes, please describe type of disadvantage how: (Max 50 words)
ChaloBEST uses technology to bridge the digital divide in urban transportation, by promoting use of public transit by the majority of citizens without access to private vehicles. ChaloBEST aims to reduce costs of travel, revitalise our environment and public spaces, and end growing class divisions in mobility in Indian cities.
Please give a short description of the facilitating organization’s mission (Max 50 words)
FSF India strives to ensure that free and open source software (FOSS) forms a genuine and viable alternative to proprietary software for all kinds of applications. Our mission is pursued via computing in Indian languages, building educational infrastructure, and providing platforms for citizens and communities to build solutions using FOSS.
Please give a short description of the overall, long-term, development goal towards which the project is expected to contribute. (Max 500 characters)
Our goal is to solve the crisis of sustainable mobility in the developing world by leveraging mobile SMS, web, smartphones and print media. We aim to provide software solutions for the hardware of rapidly urbanising cities in India and across the Global South. Using public data from transit agencies, community and word-of-mouth networks, and free and open source software, our objective is to re-imagine the culture of transit and information in Mumbai, India and via partners in other cities.
Please give a short description of your project (less than 2000 characters). Please note that if your project is approved this summary may be used for publication on the UN-HABITAT and NSF website and information materials. Be accurate in your description and include the type of project, location, theme(s), objective(s), duration in months, number and profile of beneficiaries, activities implemented and methods used. Please be concise and clear.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transport” - Enrique Peñalos
ChaloBEST is an multi-disciplinary collaboration of developers, designers, researchers and activists dedicated to public transit and sustainable mobility in Mumbai and Indian cities since January 2011. Our mission is to make transit information available via web, SMS, smartphones and print media in multiple local languages. Our methodology is based on the use of open and public datasets, community information and participation, and free and open source software (FOSS).
ChaloBEST aims to create citizen-centric models to solve the growing crisis of mobility in Indian and other cities of the Global South. We want to make it easy, fun and “cool” to take the bus or train, thereby renewing our urban infrastructure as networked social spaces and a vibrant public commons, where commuting is an essential and everyday act of citizenship.
We work via a partnership model founded on sharing data and software with the BEST (Brihanmumbai Electric Supply & Transport Undertaking), Mumbai's well-known municipal bus company. Our focus began with busses – the most agile form of transit in Mumbai, where car culture and road networks keep growing. We have since embraced embrace all modes of urban mobility, from cycles to trains to walking.
ChaloBEST began as a studio-based learning experiment at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai. In 2012, were the first-prize winners in the “Sankranti” student competition sponsored by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. We continue to receive support from various donors for our apps and services, which through support from UN Habitat Youth Fund we now seek to take public.
All of our voluntary and funded work to date has been performed by students, part-time contributors and hackers in their late twenties and early thirties. We manage our group through consensus-based decision-making. We aim to scale up and transfer our tools to other cities in India through our growing online community at http://chalobest.in and code and document repository on http://github.com/chalobest
Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of the problems or issues that your project seeks to address and why they are important to young people.
Our problem is defined by a simple question faced by urban citizens on an everyday basis -- “how do I get to my destination?”. How this question is answered in every developing city will determine the sustainability and social justice of urban environments and economies for decades to come, with effects on everything from resource consumption to climate change.
In developing cities, growing wealth and rapid increase in vehicle ownership has led to increased traffic congestion, pollution, and everyday stress in public spaces. “Car culture” has overtaken public transit, especially for aspiring middle-class youth, contirbuting to neglect of civic infrastructure and increasing inequalities in access to mobility.
Public agencies have been slow to adopt new strategies for engaging commuters, especially through public information and mobile technologies. To solve this problem, for the “hardware” of routes, busses, trains, roads and stops, ChaloBEST makes “software” for communicating up-to-date transit information and interacting between commuters and transit agencies.
We aim to empower citizens through mobile technologies by providing up-to-date transit and routing information across the digital divide of SMS, web, smartphone, print and word-of-mouth media. Our approach is based on youth leadership, community participation, open and public data shared by official bodies, and free and open source software which can be deployed at marginal cost.
** Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of the immediate outcomes of your project. The outcomes are the effects or changes that your project intends to bring about among the target group or in the community. Please indicate how you intend to evaluate these outcomes.**
We aim for more efficient and increased usage of public transportation in Mumbai through testing and feedback on ChaloBEST apps and services by a selected beta tester community first, scaling up to the commuting public at large. Our registration and tracking systems for ChaloBEST users will allow us to store and analyse their queries and usage patterns for evaluating the efficacy of our prototypes.
We also aim to promote greater consciousness and participation of citizens in public infrastructure, by closing the knowledge gap between official transit agencies and the average commuter-citizen on the street. Through our beta tester programme and public media campaign (see Activities below) we will disseminate media to promote our services, solicit feedback, and monitor progress via ChaloBEST and popular social media, blogging and networking sites.
Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of the key activities that will be implemented to reach your project outcomes.
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We will continue software development to complete public beta prototypes of web, SMS and smartphone apps and services. We will grow the community of contributors through our online code repository, issue tracker, wiki and mailing list, and develop prototypes in Pune, Bangalore, Delhi and Chennai where we have active developers.
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We will recruit a beta tester group of around 50 advanced users to field test our services, provide bug reports, feature requests, and use case documentation. Crowd-sourced data will be updated live in our database, enhancing the usability of our apps and services, and providing feedback to official agencies.
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Through a public media campaign, we will recruit hundreds more users of ChaloBEST through online registration. We will spread ChaloBEST using well-designed multi-lingual print media with simple instructions and links on our apps and services. These will be distributed to commuters, businesses and educational institutions for further dissemination.
Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of the specific results that your activities will deliver. Please indicate how you intend to evaluate these results.
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Mobile applications for delivering bus schedules, stops and routing information via SMS, web, and smartphones, publishing common information across all types of low-cost and high-end devices and serving both all classes of citizens via common interfaces in multiple languages.
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Web-based services and a live public database to be enriched by citizen commuters “crowd-sourcing” data from about local institutions, services, and communities around every bus route, stop and transit node in Mumbai, providing community “software” for the city's “hardware”.
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Public media strategies to reimagine the transport system as public space and social network, with creatively designed, multi-lingual stickers, maps, and guides, and word-of-mouth marketing through schools, colleges, shops, and institutional transit nodes.
We will evaluate results and efficacy of these outputs based on numbers and quality of public participation in testing, reporting and involvement in development.
Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of your organizations ability to successfully complete the project, including your ability to coordinate staff and volunteers, manage and account for money, and evaluate and report on your project. Please indicate any previous experience in managing projects and any support you expect to receive from partner organizations.
ChaloBEST has been in existence since Jan 2011 and since then has received more than USD $10,000 in funds for succesful completion of project deliverables. Our team of partners comprises fifteen core members of different age groups, of whom eleven are below the age of 32, many of whom have studied or worked together.
We run a mailing list with around fifty subscribers where decisions, plans and ideas are circulated to a wider community. Work is decentralised and based on voluntary interest. We are governed by a partner memorandum since June 2011, revised subsequently in January 2012, to which anyone undertaking paid work must be signatory.
Our management is collective, non-hierarchical and consensus-based. We have successfully resolved issues and problems which have arisen as we have grown. The coordinator and manager have had more than ten years of working experience in the non-profit, arts, academic, and technology sectors in Mumbai, both managing projects and directing organisations.
Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of the potential problems or risks that may cause the project to be less successful and how you plan to overcome these problems.
ChaloBEST has already succeeded in several major technology milestones in our earlier phases, and we are convinced will be successful with the tools we have built for accessing up-to-date transit information across devices and platforms, and in print and public space.
The real challenges will come in scaling up this system for serving the entire population as a public service, and making it truly reliable and user-friendly in our urban environment. We have observed various “smart transport” technology initiatives in India, where poor design or implementation results in quick obsolescence, as a demanding public rejects the system.
We also run the risk that we may no longer continue receiving and sharing data with public transit agencies like BEST or Suburban Railways. We have already sought a more formal memorandum with BEST, whose officials have supported our work since Jan 2011 (see Partnerships below). We remain confident of continuing official help and growing public support.
Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of why your project is different from other projects. Please indicate how the new ideas, methods or technologies you are using will add value to the project.
ChaloBEST is designed to be replicable and scalable at low or no capital costs, using open source software, generic server and telecom infrastructure, and free documentation available online. Almost our entire funding outlay has been on paying people, growing a community of young developers and designers by providing opportunities for paid work in the public good.
We build an ecosystem to foster collaboration between citizens, technologists and officials. ChaloBEST works on existing devices using open standards, rather than creating closed systems like most commercial proprietary products. Our work is based on state-of-the-art open source projects used all over the world, and can be transferred to other developing cities in India and the South with marginal investment.
We aim to serve all classes of users, in multiple languages, both with and without data connections, with either basic mobiles and smartphones. This approach is meant to reach a wide spectrum of commuters across the social and digital divide.
Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of how the project will continue to operate when the grant from the Indian Youth Fund is finished. Please identify alternative sources of funding such as potential donors, income generated by the project, participation fees, etc.
ChaloBEST is designed to be replicable and scalable at marginal or low capital costs, using open source software, generic server and telecom infrastructure, and public documentation online. With very low investment required, our sole outlay is on team members who volunteer their time to work on something they enjoy.
Our long-term plan for sustainability of ChaloBEST is based on two years of experience of generating opportunities for young developers, designers and researchers who are concerned about cities and passionate about public transport. We have sustained work and grown our team from numerous sources – from educational institututions, grant agencies, prize awards and private donations.
Please refer “Additional Financing” below for more information on our previous and current support. If we initiate inclusion of various sustainable commercial revenue streams including corporate support and advertising once we reach the public beta stage, it shall be decided at the appropriate time.
Please give a short description (less than 1000 characters) of how you plan to involve the local government, private enterprises or other non-governmental organizations in the project and how their participation will add value to the project.
ChaloBEST would not be possible without BEST. Our project is based on the data shared quarterly with us by Brihanmumbai Electric Supply & Transport Undertaking since Jan 2011. Over two year we have analysed their datasets, built processes to augment and transform them into open data and web services, and established a feedback loop with their officials.
This spirit of free and open information technology is our basis at the Gnowledge Lab, HBCSE/TIFR, where we have studied and worked for over ten years. Our open-door learning studio has attracted a wide range of skills, ideas and partnerships to ChaloBEST.
These include individuals in social sciences, design, and technology; companies like Sparc Systems in hardware design, MacGregor Tech for Android apps, Topomancy in geospatial mapping; and NGOs like CAMP, FSF India and OpenStreetMap India community. We also work with New IndicTrans in Pune and BusRoutes.In in Chennai/Bangalore who also build free and open tools for public transit.
Please indicate whether you expect the project to receive additional financing from other donors or through self-financing. Please list the donors and the amount of money they will be contributing to the project (less than 1000 characters).
We expect that ChaloBEST will continue sustaining itself through support we have achieved since the start of the project in January 2011 at HBCSE/TIFR in Mumbai. Our prototype design stage from Feb to Oct 2012 was supported by our first-prize award and grant in the Sankranti Transform Urban India student competition, sponsored by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS).
We support ongoing development on a daily rate system for team members to volunteer their time, paid by small donations from companies like Sparc Systems Ltd, Topomancy LLC and individuals who believe in ChaloBEST. Since our last grant ended in Nov 2012, we have been able to raise USD $350-500 per month from micro-donations, and will continue doing so towards the public beta.
We are also under consideration for further incubation from IIHS for a minimum of USD $10,000 for six months, and in talk with two private donors in Mumbai for similar support.