Dear Friends,

We are a group of students/researchers from TIER, UC Berkeley and DAIICT,
Gandhinagar working on developing a system for data management and
dissemination of data about the implementation of rural development
projects in India under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(NREGA) (http://nrega.nic.in). Our main focus in developing the system is
a flexible user friendly interface and active participation of general
public in the system. We have used visualizations as a medium for
publishing the data and enabled an annotation feature for the
visualizations for users to make comments on the data and discuss and
developed tools for cross verifying financial records at social audits.

We are interested in feedback from members on this list on our design
ideas as more generally on the potential for IS to help better utilization
of NREG funds. All kinds of comments are welcome - both on the design and
on the features. If you can look at the link below and send us ideas that
would be great, if you are in the Gandhinagar / Hyderabad areas, working
on NREG, and are open to a short interview, let us know.

The details of the website are as follows.
Link:
http://shirin.cs.berkeley.edu:8000/ruralscope/version1/src/villagemap/

(pls see instructions to test social audit below)
„X The visualizations can be found from the link visualizations.
„X The social audit can be seen from the link social audit .
„X To create a new dataset and visualizations, go to the link create Dataset.
o Select category as works and dimension as location. Select measures from
Estimated expenditure, Total Expenditure, Estimated number of days, Total
number of days, because the data is consistently available for these
parameters.
o Now select the level of aggregation for location and create the dataset
by giving it a title.
o After that, one can put constraints on the parameters of the dataset to
create a view. Create a view by giving it a title.
o From the view, one can save it as a visualization, which can be referred
to gain and again using the URL.
o All these titles are present as links in categories (Datasets, Views,
Visualizations) and are accessible from the homepage for navigation.
„X For doing a social audit, use this following job card number:

091261503006020002