Bulgaria: Mapping Crime and Electoral Violations
Written byRuslan Trad
Bulgarian blogger Boyan Yurukov has set up Bulgaria's first Ushahidi-based site, Crime.bg, whose goal is to collect signals of crimes and irregularities, via the site itself as well as through mobile applications, Twitter and Facebook. On his blog, Yurukov explained the reasons [bg] for creating Crime.bg: “1. People's lack of trust in police; and 2. Lack of open public data on crime rates in Bulgaria.” Crime.bg has inspired other activists in Bulgaria to use Ushahidi: e.g., Izboren Kodeks (“Election Code”), a web initiative to track violations in the electoral process.
Written byRuslan Trad
2 comments
Actually the the election tracking site is also deployed by me. It will be supported however by the NGO “Izboren Kodeks”. Also, a little correction I learned yesterday – although crime.bg has been out there for a year now, the official launch was in the beginning of August. A month earlier another platform was launched – belene.org/map which fights atomic energy in Bulgaria. This makes it the first public platform in Bulgaria :) Just to be fair.
There’s been a lot of interest in the platform since I wrote my first article a month ago. Since then I’ve had request to help for at least 3 new deployments – corruption, stray dog and travel destinations. I also have another idea about a deployment, but it needs to be in cooperation with once specific ministry. I’m waiting for their response now.