Appropriate IT’s Innovation Lab is delighted to announce the release of our first product: Janani, an open source crowdsourcing + citizen engagement platform for social accountability.

Janani is a citizen engagement platform ideal for crowdsourced assessments of publicly funded projects, monitoring of service delivery to citizens, improving accountability in governance, or increasing participation for programs.

Janani: Crowdsourcing + Citizen Engagement

Key features of the platform include:

• An easy-to-use text messaging platform that facilitates greater citizen participation
• Real-time visual mapping of citizen-reported problems and resolutions
• Focus on resolving issues and responding back to citizens, thus closing the feedback loop and enabling engagement
• Multiple levels of security and anonymization built into the system to protect complainants’ identity and personal information
• Built-in issue validation and information verification process utilizing a combination of online and offline methods
• Visualization with charts and maps, for both comparative purposes as well as positive incentive to resolve issues
• And more…see Janani’s product page at http://janani.appropriateit.org/

The first project on Janani’s code base launched in June 2014. Citizen Action Platform – a joint effort of Appropriate IT, Anti Corruption Coalition of Uganda, and Partnership for Transparency Fund – is monitoring health care service delivery in Uganda’s Apac district.

Janani is currently in closed beta and is seeking a select group of innovative international development projects to join as partners (find out more and apply for Janani’s Beta Partner Program). Janani is built on Drupal, a powerful open source content management framework and is slated for release as an open source distribution after the beta.

Please get in touch with us if you are interested in joining and would like to schedule a demo.