 Okay, sorry about the delay, welcome everybody to this manned discussion as it always is part of the specific conference. I am Zaina Pawar from Hasbik and my team members at here, there is Kiran Tamna and Radha Tony who is also a busy partner in the event. We organized technology conferences for developers. One for upcoming conferences is in July called the 5th elephant which the conference will be here in analytics. This year we were curious to see what really happened in the elections that just concluded recently how data was used, how technology was used and that motivated us to put this panel together. I'd like to thank Arun Rang who came in the fairly last minute to help us moderate this panel and the format of the event has changed. I'm going to let Arun introduce the format of the event shortly. Arun is a lead business owner at Tech Mahindra. On a personal side he's very passionate for technology and the possibilities that technology presents. Arun has been one of the early organe- one of the organe- one of the organes in the early of our camps and he's also very active in the immediate and co-founder of Wikimedia India. I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank the Centre for Internet and Society who has graciously provided us the venue today and support here. Like Ellen wanted to say a few words about the CIS and let the audience know about the CIS and then we'll take over. I'm Ellen and I'm the Program Manager for Internet Governance here at CIS and we just wanted to give a warm welcome to everybody. CIS is a six-year-old think-take policy NGO and we work in a number of different areas including freedom of expression, privacy, surveillance, access to knowledge, telecom so a wide range of different areas and we're very happy and privileged to work closely with Hazkeek and we hope everyone enjoys this kind of session here. Okay. Okay, good evening everybody. My name is Arun and thanks for coming to your good numbers. Friday evening is not a time perhaps to in Bangalore City to sit and watch a panel discussion but perhaps sit in a park. So thanks for coming over and hope you find the next couple of hours interesting. Obviously we've had a very exciting general elections and the world has been watching us, all of you have been actively participating in some form or the other. So this evening we are here to sort of sit and discuss what sort of role did technology play in elections 2014. How did the different parties, how did the different stakeholders in the whole election process use technology and what came out of the query? I've got a very eminent panel here and some of them are very very distinguished people. So first of all a big round of applause for you. First of all, to my left is Mr. B.G. Ramesh. He's founder and managing director of one India and he is a technocrat and he's done a lot of work in the technology specifically around Indian languages and the internet specifically. His organization is very good people for what they do with this infrastructure. He's been a very key part of the voting campaign and I will perhaps let him add a few words to this. So I actually have been involved in the portals and in the Indian languages for more than 15 years and that was the reason why I was asked to be involved in the digital campaign of Modi and my involvement in that campaign was in my personal capacity and my company was not actually a part of the campaign. Thank you. I'm pleased to introduce the next gentleman of the panel, Mr. B.G. Ramesh. B.G. Ramesh is the founder of the Bangalore Media Foundation which is involved in skilled enhancement projects in the media. The Bangalore Media Foundation has a project pledged to work which paid a crucial role in water wireless building which has been a TV journalist for 17 past years and has been involved in the media coordination of various campaigns and various campaigns. So would you like to add a few words? Good evening everybody. In fact I'm pleased to be here to be able to share my thoughts with you because this is something that certainly we need to discuss because any such interaction is learning for me as well and I feel that this is going to be something that we are going to learn from each other in the next couple of hours to be able to understand as to how technology is driven in this political election and as far as future elections are concerned how the voters need to be aware of what technology can do for them and what they need to learn about political parties so that's going to be my take on this. Alright, the next panelist, the last panelist out there is Viral Shah. He's co-creator of the Julia language and has formally worked on the other RUID project and was part of the team that strategized and executed another male in this campaign. Would you like to say a few words to introduce yourself? Hi, so I'm Viral and I think the only other thing I'd like to add is that to execute this campaign we actually set up a firm called The Fourth Line Technologies and which executed a lot of the digital and technology parts of this campaign which we've talked more about. I think that's all I have to say. I think the point, I'll be talking predominantly about the Bangalore South campaign that we've computed for all my commentator board, local perhaps. The colleagues will have more time. Thank you. So in summary, we have an independent view from an independent journalist another gentleman who's been part of the BJP campaign and the other gentleman who's been part of Nandu's campaign. Perhaps a constrictor's absence is someone from the AAP party and I think the organizers could reach out to them but they weren't able to participate in this event. So without much ado, let's get started. I'll probably give you a view of how this event has been structured and then this is designed to let you folks interact with the panelist as we go in the session. So let me just give you a view of how this has been organized. We have four segments for the day. Initially we start off with just an introduction to pick up the four segments and each of the segments we will have, it's like an open format where the panelists will share their views and might post a long question which will trigger their discussion. And then at the end of the section, we will have about 10 minutes for open discussions with all of you. And Jaisa, are we having interaction from online as well? No. Alright, no worries. So we have four segments for the day. So let me just introduce those four segments as such. The first segment is focused around how do different parties and organizations look at the demography using technology. How do they look at applying technology for the campaigns on the social level, the central level, the state level and the candidate level. I'm sure we love this shape. It's a fairly large country with its own complexities. So applying technology helps on nuances as well. The second part of the segment will be purely focused around web as a channel. What do they do differently to reach out to the potential water through their websites or through languages, etc. That's the second part. The third one, of course, is something that everybody uses in Luxembourg, which is social media. How do these organizations, parties, use social media essentially in your Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in terms of their campaign. Of course, we have WhatsApp as well, which plays a huge role in terms of influencing people's thoughts and views as well. And of course, the last one is, of course, the mobility segment, which is in terms of mobile applications that people created for candidates, or for parties, or for state organizations in order to get the message operated and manifest those of what the candidates could draw. So that, in the sense, is the first segment we have today. And you folks will be interacting quite often in the session like those rather than people on the Q&A to get it. Is that okay from a format perspective? All right. So let's get started. We start off with the first segment, if you folks are all fine. Like I said, the first segment is more focused around, let's first start with the first question. What in your opinion do you think was the role of technology in this campaign to start? Obviously, we all know that there were various different ways in which voters were influenced. Perhaps it was the candidates themselves speaking at rallies. It was perhaps the national media, particularly broadcast media. And of course, there was technology. There were go-to-go campaigns, et cetera. And so I just want to pose a question to the panelists in terms of their own takes on what part of influencing voters did the technology aspect play? And how do you compare it with others? So I'd like to take perhaps we'll start with the day. The BJP was the only one which had the campaign reported for the party and for all the candidates to combine. We were the only ones who had and which was being constantly updated. So I would say that here the technology was used a lot by which the content whatever we were publishing was used as a very good source for the mainstream media because it had become very difficult for either to say the frame or the TV or I mean journalists in general were not able to get the news about the rallies, the photos from each of the rallies. So I would say that in that way using the technology we were able to reach the people who could spread the information about the campaign in a lot more. For example not everybody has access to internet but they have access to the print or the TV. But so from our point of view the content was going into all these media channels. So actually for us the technology was sort of the blood in the body is going through every organ. The technology was part of everything we did in the Nandan Nilekini campaign. And of course we did everything without technology. The world existed without any technology 20 years ago for the most part. But today technology is an integral part of any business process or anything we do. It's difficult to imagine how you do something in today's world without technology. And right from the website or social media something that you would have seen. But we used technology, let me give you some examples where all we used it. For example every time one of our volunteers knocked on someone's door and we had almost close to 100,000 door knocks that we ended up with. We recorded as many of these door knocks or touches to a voter for example. All the analytics and all which will come to a later point or every interaction on social media. So on every phone call, every SMS, even a letter that we sent to every voter. So technology is behind everything and I mean it would be very difficult to run a campaign at least after having run this one. I cannot imagine how one could run a campaign without technology. Coming from the voters point of view, one thing I want to share is that the voter this time was taken by surprise by the use of technology by all political parties. The BJP had a head start in this. I remember I was still in active journalism on September 1. One India started the ground work. So one India didn't start. The India 270. India 270. At the same centre. When India 272 started the ground work at JNNN and I was still in the JNN because I had gone there. I could not get access to their office and could not wear the make-believe attenuation in Mumbai. But one of the things also in the fact that technology per se was not only used to the advantage of the political parties it was also misused. That's something that the voters realised much later maybe most of them would be in the polling game. Now how it was misused is one thing where the digitalization of the electoral rules one aspect that comes to mind. Deletions became such a common thing. He noticed that in 2013 there was a place to vote foundation that we formed in 2012. Clearly he noticed that a lot of voters could not get a chance to vote because there was a lot of deletions. It only needed one of the people to delete an entire page or that kind of thing. He said of you know scratching of things. This is the kind of complaints that they got in 2013. So as place to vote we started to work as early as November where we found that collusion of some BMP officials with ground level political workers across parties. I would not believe one party for it. Across parties the only thing that they used technology for was to ensure that person X is not my potential voter his name should be deleted. Person Y the other party was not his voter his name should be deleted. This is something which forced us to go to the high court. There were several organizations which fight for voters rights. They gone and got a stay on 16th of December where any deletions after that were prevented using this thing. And that's where technology has its advantages no doubt it made campaigns clear it made campaigns easier but as far as the voter is concerned most of the voters presumed that their names wouldn't be there just because they had the voter ID card. They assumed that they are going to be a part of the electoral process only to realize much greater than their names would be deleted. So that is where we fought this cost and we got a stay and luckily after December there were no further deletions and that's something which all the voter awareness campaigns could do. So this is something where we need to also figure out how technology has to be adopted by the voter himself because this is something that is going to be only becoming difficult in the future because the segregation that most candidates have got to think about BJP or the communist kind of thing is that at random search put 500 names you are able to find out the voters religion. So you know which are your strong areas which are your weak areas and this happened across country and this is something which makes us imagine you know the kind of idea I had where Abhishek said that everybody should have a mobile number instead of a name because the name is a giveaway. Those kind of things where you know the real identity of the voters has to be protected that he cannot be marked by a political party as a person belonging to this religion or this caste and should be either promoted or ignored. I would like the panelists to draw some light on how did you conceive your strategy for technology before the campaign? How did you decide? How did you go about deciding how would apply to the center state so if you see the portal which we built which is a platform for the volunteers the reason this happened was Mr. Modi was getting every day I think at least you know 600 emails to 1000 emails every day across the country where everybody said they wanted to be involved with him like you know for one year or 6 months and few people were telling from home you know they can be able to contribute whether in a copywriting creative stuff or whatever it is so at that point he felt that you know we needed the platform where we could bring in all the volunteers and it is that way we actually started this and I think actually whatever we have done implemented the main features it all came from in him we just implemented everything it actually came from so we had the platform where we had the the parliamentary the consequences across the country so everyone who actually you know signed up for the volunteering was able to say he is in which place and he was also able to inform us in what he is able to conduct so in that way we knew that you know which areas in the country or you know they gave extremely you know I would say savvy with the way with the net so we saw obviously the very big cities were there on the platform Yakuna, Mysore and you know West Bengal from there we saw the amount of people who were there you know it was actually good but the sign up if they signed up through the face we would know the actual profile because the name age etc but if they would fill up the form which we had I mean you know except for the email address the many times people give the fake information so the average age I would say about anywhere from from 21 to 30 you know for actually more candidates from no perspective candidates and campaigns they had to do it on their own no so for each of the candidates when they had to do the digital one you know they would do on their own but they would also do it with us because we had you know you bought it years from in their actual constants but the creatives the content all go from Moscow or the candidates any of you would like to add in terms of overall strategy that was applied in terms of how it was conceived at the start of the campaign in our campaign given that we were focused on a very specific geography which was Bangalore South you know the preparatory work involved sort of understanding the lay of the land which is you know the constituency I mean any guesses from any of how large the parliamentary constituency is maybe the fourth interaction answers a lot of glist Bangalore South is saying about a million voters that's at least two million one million actually cast the vote I mean one point one odd 11 lakh votes were cast but actually the size of the voter list is 20 lakh voters and the area is fairly large I mean you know the entire population of Bangalore split into three constituency so you know jumping in as a new candidate and a team which was sort of inexperienced with politics and campaigning at the start of the campaign how do you get to understand what is the kind of area what are the kind of people here what are the aspirations what are the demographics like what are the issues that they will vote on in the election what was the past electoral performance of this region are there some regions that behave differently are there pockets of one kind so it will be a lot of people so as a candidate they just give you what's available on the eC website you don't get anything more than that so you have to make do with those eCF files yeah we looked at I mean we extracted whatever data was available publicly available from the electrodes for our analysis and execution so how is it your current with that data again do you want to have more questions Sivya yeah no I'll definitely come back to you see from technology point of view the only thing I can add is that the election commission did a great job the fact that today they've been able to comprise their records across the country subject to which is really commendable the fact that people can enroll online and also in divisions with passports etc. is something which technology adaptation by a government department is a very phenomenal thing but for you know small errors of you know point 1% or .2% overall data is something which is very very accurate and was able to be the the only thing is the people did not know how to use it because most of us are not very familiar to search for a thing because there is a mark number and all those things maybe in that aspect of technology where the voters need to be made away as to how to trace out their name and addresses from whether they are there in the voter list that is something that the people will have to get after a good technology that much more powerful to be able to make best ability all of the people that I think they had a problem with they did set up camps they did set up what we must do the response was not very good because you know despite that there was a big on the last day and that was something as much as the internet total was their technology adoption was really very good and your question as to you know how easy it was between October and the last day of the finalist there were 3 revisions that happened in the span of 4 months and that is something which you know because of that kind ok lets move on to the next question which is around how did when you applied technology for your campaigns how did you leverage the locations where these teams spread across and what sort of teams were involved behind these campaigns you know for us you know when we reveal their Bangalore the Bombay and the Gandhi Nagar obviously because there was something with the teams we had here and we also had it in Delhi but each of us were working on separate parts of the project and so for example the content the creativity was happening over here the language the campaign the creators was happening over here actually back and it was happening from Gandhi Nagar because he was involved actually about what had to be done what had to be changed so if you look at this we were there in few locations and every week we used to be in practice about what things have now had to be part of and so changed do you like to act as a location where even one campaign I mean we were all sort of located right in Bangalore south campaign office was in Chinagur near Ashoka people were familiar with the area we had a number of teams we had to hit upon the composition of a campaign team there were of course we had a dedicated technology team doing all the things that we talked about but we had to have a legal and compliance team we had a communication commission a very strict reporting guidelines for campaign expenses finances and all that we had a communications team following the news and media every day posting updates on social media handles on our website in our press releases we had a field team which would coordinate all our volunteer efforts and political coordination to coordinate with offices of various leaders and such that's about all I have to say on this I keep hearing about the teams can I get a quick sense of what is the plan for the team? yeah I know it's my follow up question so one question is what were the kind of teams you see in national campaign there's people who are working the whole time you know between four cities to be about about this one hundred but if you include the volunteers you mentioned were in every part of the thing I mean I'm not sure it's important it's twenty thousand or whatever so what did the volunteers do? what were they charged with? some technologies you know few people who were involved in the door to door this is a for example because from the platform people would come to know what is the message informed so that's some small small small jobs there are so many who were scanning all the websites to see if anything was positive, the spamming, the negative because he's a man where you know the number of things go everywhere so there are so many things in each other what could have been the size of the job our team I mean like a campaign team not counting volunteers and party workers and such was about forty people a lot of them were sort of freelancers it's not like forty full-time within the forty people in the campaign team some of them were volunteers some of them were full-time some of them were part-time and sort of roles kind of depending on the life cycle of the campaign communication becomes very important messaging becomes very important in the last two weeks or four weeks more important sort of in the planning stage you know but about audience when you spoke earlier you touched on some of what I would call use cases of where technology was applied we learned a little more what you talked about more embedded what calls to answer we learned more use cases the audience sees typically as a voter what they see is like an information but if you look at it behind the back in terms of how you guys needed the mechanics of how you went about reaching the various different things what are the different use cases which is not very obvious to somebody else internally I would say that the preparation that we had to do would probably not be visible right outside is for example we went with a message on Bangalore how did we come to it the starting point of everything in an election is the voter list so as someone raised the question we start with the voter list extract it understand the demographics general composition area wise composition how many votes come from which area so on and so forth from there on we sort of worked towards this is where sort of technology you start going away from pure technology like you have to meet with people what were the different groups of voters young people, old people working professional, south wise retired, so broadly 10 to 12 classes of people and we actually conducted focus groups with them we brought all the data back in from qualitative research quantitative research and sort of put that all together and then took a call on how to come up with our campaign's message the blank on which the campaign would come so this is for example one of the things I mean you know that we did we ended up using very traditional off the shelf in fact everything was open source that we used in terms of tools so a lot of it you know I don't know if you want to get the tools I just want to focus on the tools any other use cases come to you I know I mean if I internal like you suggest this is what it is would you like to, would you like to supply it in terms of what all you folks would do I think after this I mean the examples I want to give is mainly in terms of you know the social media we want to improve that more in terms of how what are the things it used for internet which courses people are getting through the resources that's the kind of internal use case do you use any other data not only the ECA provided do you use anything else the confidence targeting the product so see in now our case you know one big advantage we had was because we were you know collecting the data on the platform but how how do we spread the information or the fact that you know that we have a platform the best way was Mr. Mogi he used to go on the talks you know the TV and say that if you want to work for me if you want to help me you know I love on to the photo see the spike in the thing and from that we should get out of there so once you get you know say about 100 people who you register from the 100 another 100 100 100 that it became and from that we actually become this is what you want to add see I was talking from the media point of view they are not much but whatever if you could add more up you used cloud telephony that was something which was a tool that they had used for reaching out in daily life pretty closely and even here that they were able to get volunteers to work out on a tight cloud telephony system which they used very well to be able to reach out so whenever you do membership or you know the miss call campaigns that they had those were their basic information gathering systems as to who could be a potential voter that was something that they had done a good homework on to be able to get those miss calls free membership so nothing else but to be able to get back to people in time I am sure many of you also did give those miss calls over here and were able to like you know maybe contribute because as far as Varanasi campaign is concerned even I had volunteered for that and was able to make about 40 calls from here to people which did help in getting the resources on the ground they had limited people and then again volunteers many of them were able to control a lot I am not sure but this is something which what little bit I know of our from there we have to see that cloud telephony is something which did work for them in fact to add to that we used the telephony a fair bit cloud telephony and even more traditional but maybe we touched upon that to talk about the specific question about using other data sources in fact we actually use the fair amount of data sources apart from what is available on the EC website so apart from electoral data we use data on how media is consumed so what language is what newspapers what TV channels so there is a leadership survey that we can get we superimpose that on our electoral data we also superimpose the income data that was available we use census data and one such step that we collected on the ground from our own surveys or teams you know cameras so the whole point was to bring everything onto a common platform and then ask specific questions and go on it was incredibly useful to be able to do such an exercise and we created a tool called Hawkeye which we have talked about a little bit in the campaign as well we actually just pick on a map or you could pick any location in Bangalore South and all of this data electoral data, basically a mashup of all this stuff also budgets that what the local government has spent on various things whatever was available in the public domain a mashup of all of this and use that to really raise our safety level we have to buy some map data but that's about it secret data no, but actually in the market you will get many phone calls you have the phone numbers of everybody in Bangalore so we didn't buy any since you spoke about phone telephony my number this is my policy no one knows my number and I got automated phone calls from from the BSNL phone from the BSNL phone that is not public data it's public data from the direct link I would have cheated now but it's not perhaps it's family this is half way to open this is half way to open to public we are going to we are repackaging it and we will be launching it shortly for public news how much of data did you have to generate and how much of data was available in the team generally it was I would say the amount of information was there was already there a lot from the EC website the real world started after that because it had to be processed it had to be put into various buckets so I think the work was there more the best data that you get EC is about what level the book level and all book level and what level beyond that as we said it's available from there's a book for every book they'll tell you how many men how many women those are available those are available not gender wise not gender wise not gender wise both level polling percentages can be it shows you as to how the tendency of the voters in that particular area gender wise you have to get by by means of surveys or whatever because when we launched we used this data for doing specific campaigns in those particular areas like Koinungla has got one of the worst track recorders and you found that even in this entire thing the total polling was only 39.8% it shows that a lot more work needs to be done to actually go I just want to ask we are the data sources we are the data sources but in addition to what you had the actual ones other than that as I told once the people know that you are ignored in the campaign you get a lot of false reports I'm handling this data but there is no way to verify what we are about to buy because you don't know whom you are actually calling actually mostly scam artists we did not buy a single one from outside in fact we did not buy any data that you we got various calls also 5,000 rupees in this CD actually speaking it's not very expensive for the entire city they will give for 5,000 bucks so all those things are there but one good source of you know data actually I would say is Facebook because almost every Indian who is on the internet who is basing the time is actually on Facebook but that quality of the data there is very good because you know the gender age group and all of that so I think when it comes into the internet I can explain what few things what we did and it worked very well and consciously extending this segment because it sets the tone for the others and can create some platform for the discussion I just wanted to bring another dimension in the discussion which is languages we all talked about resources of data so obviously we have louder obviously we have a nation where people speak so many different languages there is also the urban, rural divide where there are so many languages to kind of deal with at least each state as a major language so how do you guys decide what languages to focus on obviously at limited resources we put that money everywhere and which all languages to focus on I am sure that is a little bit just a little explanation so I mean it is a no brainer that Hindi was the most important one because more than half of Hindi or half of the motorist is you know from the Hindi speaking thing that is one but Hindi when we made the creatives for the campaign which went across the websites we did in all the languages you know the south Indian you know you name the language we made sure so all the targeted which we had the campaign for example the campaigns which went to Maharashtra they were in English and Marathi for example and we saw that the response of the banners in the languages it was the higher than the traditional ones and in I know on Modi's blog all the articles were translated to some I think approximately 17 or so all the languages all the every article was there so I would say Hindi yet Tamil yet Kannada and all that I think the response was good 17 languages 17 or there about there about what about the websites so there was a 17 language thing across channels as in mobile, website banner ads or was it just some of the channels but his blog is in all languages so whether people are using his app or the browsing on the phone you were able to use all the languages so our campaign to a large extent it was in English to a very large extent and to some extent in Hindi our goal was to do all the languages but the amount of work we had for English alone was very high we had as you know close to say 500 rallies if I am right so for each rally the amount of work we had was extremely high very few people knew the homework of what are the important issues he had to actually speak about and as he speaks the reactions from the media were being actually they posted and after the rally for about half a day we would go and from AFP to the etc. so by the end of the day for each rally he wanted to see the report so when he flies he wanted to see the report for each rally so that itself was exhaustive work and to sit and do that in 15 languages we didn't have a range of reports increasingly did sir see he always wanted to know it's not for every rally but say if he goes to a particular you know a constancy he wanted to know that what do people from there want you know what are the local things which has to be talked of course everywhere we can talk about the road water and all that no because of the platform we had we had the volunteers you know so they were giving us the feedback and that we would actually compile and you know send it to them we would not send in the raw data we would say so many people after talking about this this this this so he wanted only those important points how would he like to talk about it so would you like to write on how any campaign language and different channels and different languages we used one in here we did use one in here current actually here actually Canada was a very important language for us it was a very small fraction of the people are English speaking but they also either speak at least Canada or English so we were able to get away with these two so on the floor we did Canada and English on our website we had all the basic content was both but the blogs for example were English only and this was just based from the observation looking at the browser setting that people are coming from people with language settings so in hindsight should we do Canada for the next campaign so if I can add one information about very good indicator well but I mean you know as long as they are able to consume our content you know important blog post important press releases for example in India and Canada but try to put that more internet stuff was English because Facebook you can't really do a kind of Facebook can I put some comment how many in your team do you have we have the I would say about half actually absolutely a little surprise that Canada was anyway a 19th very very short it was Canada as a very focused technology campaign because you would reach out to the audience normally they would not have easy access so that audience exactly is not the one that is on your blog for example that audience is the one you reach out through a phone call or through a speech or through a padhyatra and there the entire interface was in Canada so one thing I can say for us what was good I am going to say for you know the one India was for every you know you wrote so which he had we used to get the photos and the article in English and also in Canada so it became very easy for us to be the publishing you know the content everybody else effort all this and it was very rare because very few of the publications they thought internet was very important for spreading the news but from there in a very clean way where we were just you know you are copying and actually paste or should I for example banner ads on Canada website we did Canada and it did but we got very high tickets on putting the Canada ad in an English paper in Bangalore and we tried all these AV testing given that this is session run in the run up to some big data so you guys talked about different sources of data and what sort of real analytics and big data technology you use for top and we like to do some better what do you call my SQL of the data believe that you got the reputation because I don't want to get the technology I want to get more into how you see like I was saying we use very off the shelf commodity what's happening is such a short time and you don't want to overbid or over engineer unless you absolutely need something I can imagine if you were doing something all in there like these guys were doing maybe some role for big data and some cutting edge tools but for us my SQL and basic SQL pretty much served the purpose for us I would say that you will agree that in India this entire thing this is very first time we have got so many one thing about this campaign I learnt is you get so many calls and emails for with the free advice you got lot of free advice I am an expert in this you should do this we have so many things to do ideas within the team itself we have half of them are not actually practical to deal with but we will be very happy if you can come and work for one day and you implement the moment you ask somebody to come and implement they are all gone there is nobody there so we did not say you know directly use all these you know these keywords the big data or this and that but we use the tools the commercial tools like the SAP or you know this is one tool which we use for social media so all those tools what we used and they were using actually behind then I am sure they used the big data because even you know the tools we used they were very impressed with the amount of the data they were able to get for some more because the amount of every time it goes for a rally the number of tweets and the FBE it goes so high even to a state that we had to wait for 24 hours to get the actual you know the data even though when we went for these tools they told it is you know so real time this that but when they saw the amount of data coming in so all those things alright this has been an interesting segment you can close it off I just have a question for Pan we talked about all these exciting stuff of technology that you guys did and also sort of window of potential voter the fundamental thing if you ask me was how did you connect all these interesting findings for the grass root level guy was knocking at the door to say hello to all voters and most of them I guess are not really technology savvy just people who knock at the doors and talk to somebody and talk about the candidate how do you guys connect all these fancy tools and conclusions and then off to the average guy who is actually the volunteer from the party to sort of knock doors and how did that kind of happen and how did you approach it for us what happened is in each of these constancy we had a representative who was handling all the offline work so our contact was only with them there is no way and we don't have the expertise we were speaking to the offline guys on what they should do how they should go our expertise was to gather the information from the platform from the thing about the real issues which you need to go on top so that is the package which we were sending to the key people and who were actually passing work on the offline work what was your experience what we did was we had two things specifically for people who knocked on doors we actually had a volunteer campaign where people would come this was also screening tool as Mahesh referred to moment in time would come and anyone who is not serious he would disappear but so we had a a website that was mobile optimized where you could use it through the browser so for people who were proficient in using a smartphone with their data access they would record their conversations but for those who could not they would go with paper they would cover these streets and then they would cover make their mobile and bring it back and then some other volunteers I mean accurately it was a system so it was essentially to gather data from everyone but it was not a must that it would volunteer for the campaign you must own a smartphone and know all the object technology so paper in the system someone knocking on the door would lose an app so there were some volunteers who were capable of doing that and then there were some who were not so he accommodated both sides so one thing that I want to add is the usage of technologies when the campaign started especially there was an old ride with the BJP on the social media and other aspects there was a lot of skepticism whether this generation would go out and work that's a big question mark that was there but by the time the nation started and we had the second third now the second third phase and we saw the higher polling and sure BJP also understood that that was working for them that's the reason why we saw an old ride in the last 3-4 phases where everybody suddenly was waking up with this and the overall growth in polling that we've seen across the country about 10% clearly has shown that technology has worked that's something that you must credit the efforts of all these people who have a used technology that they were able to at least get people to go out and work that's something which really showed that this generation has already used because many old-time politicians that we met at that time said that these people are not going to come out don't even waste time on the internet that was the kind of inspiration but clearly these elections have shown that technology and social media can be used effectively and this is something that the political parties will not use this now will have to use it to understand that this is the most cost effective way to communicate that's something which is a very important aspect of this that we do it's most cost effective printing a pamphlet, going out over there is very very tough but you know sending out an email sending out messages this is something which technology has shown that campaigns can be done using the and you know social media sites are very effective it is scalable scalable is the only side of the meaning that's the meaning one last comment before we talk the professors so I didn't see I don't want to know anybody in the audience the folks in the the folks in the who are there next to the polling booths they are the guys who actually work the polling agents as they call it so I didn't see any form of data which is paper the usual as always do you see that change in some time I see different ads and laptops I can tell you specifically in our campaign it is very interesting actually I mean I don't know if we share the story right now or from the last day so you know last day is what we call in the last week of the campaign it is typically important to get out of the vote GOPV part of the campaign and especially on the last day I mean all of you here or most of you would have voted so there is a table that the party set up and then you go there and you look yourself up and there is some people how many people voted here so this is frantic activity of looking up and then you know there are so many people who are at the wrong booth and all kinds of mayhem is breaking news what we had was day before the campaign it developed a very simple just to look up you know because everyone comes with a voter ID on the last day so you don't have to do like some name and address mismatch to find the person otherwise you know it's common names in India is very impossible to find people but so with the voter ID we could look up a voter we have a small again where they label the app app here I would say website and what we did was all the volunteers that we had so we had about 200 to 300 volunteers that were planning about 300 groups along with the party workers and they all had this access to this website and at the day started we had zero hits on this thing we were not even sure you know we had the same party workers you know in fact to the point that you were like told you guys are awesome you don't know reality all that started out the day with zero hits within the first few years we were building up and these smart phone enabled volunteers were in high demand that you can actually look up someone and the case right where you may have only the book for your own book but you may not know if the person is around where you send him this is the book you have to go to write a check and send him out by afternoon we were at hundreds of hits every minute and thousands of users and the word just spread virally amongst the tables because we had no way to communicate to these tables that there is this thing I mean it was just whatever word spread around in the field and we saw this S-curve and it was quite nice we saw thousands of voters that got help other than otherwise not voted actually tens of thousands so and there was one lady who was voting for ARP actually she was at an ARP tables and she was getting upset that why is my hand not on the list and one of her volunteers walked over and she looked it up and her comment was my vote is no longer for ARP but it's for ARP so that summed it up kind of nicely for us so I do think that actually we discredit this technology a little too much saying that grass roots I mean like you almost talked about this internet-enabled youth just to put the numbers in perspective 20% of the people are at least across India around like 20-25% and winning with a margin in a typical campaign I mean not in a wave election like this but it's 5%-3% so why would you discredit anything thank you that was an interesting perspective to share but I'll just sum this up and then I'll put it over to you guys right this is an interesting segment we primarily covered how did parties approach it how did they approach strategies how did they apply different technologies how did they look at language and how did they connect the what did they do behind the rail and what did they do in front the front parts who will come in next and I think the rural and urban aspect also the team sizes etc so I hope you found this segment interesting we'll pause here and limit questions only to teams around this segment we'll come to other questions or other segments if you like to be louder I'll repeat your question I can't hear you if you like to be much louder I thought he touched upon it in terms of how they just wanted to yes I got a question let me replay your question your question is looking at the grass root level how can we use technology to them or can we use it what ideas we have around that so just to make sure I think Mr Mahesh touched upon how they had a conduit through which they worked with a non tech and I think he talked about how some of them had apps which were sort of savvy ones and he had apps so this question is how would you go about in future candidates perhaps enable the otherwise not tech savvy what is the purpose knocking at the door so we already had an app too we also had an app so any volunteer who had a smartphone was able to use it because as you told me I would not say only in the heart everywhere you know the majority of the people who are traditional workers who have been there in the party for a long time I don't know if they had it or not so to send the information to them we had the contacts in each of the area so from us information is to go to them and from them it is to spread so I would say the next one year 2 years 3 years I am pretty sure the usage of the smartphone would be I think I would say everybody would be that so I think it would be to only be good but I would say for for the first time it has been used for the first time I think the performance was actually good I agree it was the first campaign we are biased obviously does that answer your question now as a smart person like I was saying it doesn't have to be technology at the front end there will be younger party workers who are comfortable using technology in a smartphone for example you may have women who are not comfortable using it in certain parts of the country or you may have older people you don't want to leave out any potential party worker or volunteer base so you have to always have this non-technology front end and it is valued also how would you like it if someone came to your door and constantly putting on your phone while talking to you on the phone it is just nicer to come and take some notes and then someone else sort of enters it I mean there are pros and cons to both and I think you are not going to be an inner extreme for a long time to come so my take is I think they articulated very nicely how there is a lot more work to be done even behind the way he talked about the challenge of how it was so difficult to keep pace with each of those and that itself is a huge thing and he talked about how 17 languages was a huge challenge in the first place and the other gentleman talked about how two languages he said was a challenge so from that point of view there is a lot more work to be done behind the scenes as well as the others at least you get the job done but you are not trying to solve the larger problem of getting the grass root level work to become tech savvy this is a much bigger problem to some extent the grass root level workers have also got an application and it will give you a case of general assembly where the pjp gave out smartphones to every both level worker who went door to door in the last three days to check out whether the water was in town or not the job check was done and the application was very simple it started out with the rhythm only photo and then it went out to Vijay Kumar's photo and then when you swipe the word operator's photo and then from there it would get to the street number address etc. number of voters over there available not available but just pressing those buttons over there the both level worker was able to first check three days before to find out how many people were there how many people were not there to be able to get a fair idea of what it was so this is something which is going to be very simple and I am sure already the parties realize that you know compare some data which otherwise they had to carry sheets reams and reams of paper to take and mark and somebody could read so it was difficult here at end of it somebody would say that in my books 730 volts out of which 570 people are in town 270 people are not there so don't expect more than this polling plan so this is something which you know people will adapt and I am sure with you know tech savvy people like them will be heading campaigns in the future also they will be able to teach a lot more not at all so you got two interesting use cases what did it mean whether they were in town or not and the other one to help a voter find the polling vote using the overwrite there use cases pretty much so any other question one or two before we move on to the next segment you said you were collecting data from Facebook what kind of data what next segment hold that question it is costing I should have wanted so can you elaborate on how this cost there are limits in per candidate so how is this technology part of the cost put into a candidate how is it really costing calculator interesting question no, according to me it is actually back in the home it is not in the voter party we are collecting the information from everywhere doing something and informing the relevant people the candidate or party so that is okay but if you go and see we are not included in the holdings we are part of that the way campaign finance is regulated is that they are trying to sort of regulate the interface between the politician and the voter to avoid any kind of bad stuff that goes on at that interface but it does not include for example the work that you do before before nomination it happens before nomination or back end work for example you know all this work is generally done much before even when he passed so never gets laid it is like months before right campaign start what is the cost that you have to report to the AISC commission for costing is public information I was not the compliance person in the team but there is a 70 lakh limit on I guess we touched let's get back to technology so let's move on to let's move on to the next segment of sort of promoting social media because it is something that many of you may have experienced yourself so this segment is about how do parties specifically use social media in their campaigns and this is around twitter facebook whatsapp any other thing that you think is useful so how did the parties use that and let's get started with the first opening round to just set the context so you want to start from that so we made extensive use we talked about the website and our blog facebook was probably as important actually I would say more important than our website because of the social aspect of it the third important thing was twitter so on facebook we were almost touching 400,000 people who are like our page which means any update posted would I think facebook propagates 20% of your like universe every time you post so maybe you were 7 or 10 posts it would reach out to all of them so 400,000 people is a large number for us and on twitter we had 100,000 people following us coming to a close and with the way the properties kind of played out on twitter it was almost as if you were following the campaign like you were following Nandanilagini in real time like we had a person who was always there with the smartphone tweeting live photos tweets and such facebook would not be as live for us but you would see a collage of pictures and you would get a good sense but it was also there are positions and various other things we would discuss lot more lively discussion if you can call like reader participation that happened on facebook for us so that was these were the essentially we also I think was the only campaign which had a linked in profile but I don't think it got very widely used what about you on youtube we had we regularly posted videos and some of them some of the earlier part of the campaign we got very large number of hits on many of our youtube videos whatsapp interestingly I mean some campaigns I don't know how they managed to do this but people were able to send whatsapp messages to it I don't know of the kpi to whatsapp so we sort of stayed clear of trying to find some ways around that obviously it was human problems yeah that's it I saw some hacked stuff also at some point but I don't know who did it how and where but actually the more interesting use for whatsapp for us was internal use so our entire volunteer network actually sort of self-organized themselves over whatsapp information sharing pictures you know lying from the field within the campaign team so I think by the end of the campaign 30 whatsapp groups and my phone battery was just dying you know because of whatsapp sir do you want to share so you know the way we use in this entire campaign most of you will agree that his presence on AFB and all that was actually very important in this and he actually understood the power of it and he asked us that we should be posting or rather on his page because he was going to Yappune in the last I think September 2 you know the college called Ferguson's college where he was going to talk so you know very few will agree or not he has that you know what I have been told that from the team there that you know how would we ask on his AFB page to put on that I am going to be coming to Pune you know what are the issues you have and what are the things you want me to talk about and I think we had at least you know 50,000 responses 50,000 of course there are many you know they will say hello sir how are you so for us it said we have to get all those and you know you have to filter it out removing you know all those things but we did get some equality you know things over there which so I would say the concept of the crowd sourcing for a political campaign on the internet was actually a started button and for us you know we had huge the subsist on AFB we twitter on YouTube it is all you know it is actually speeches not everybody is able to watch all the other rallies in life so they go home or go later you know and they watch it the highest engagement we got was obviously from Facebook the Facebook app which we we made I think like in the month of March the other engagement we got there was you know phenomenal that is something we learnt I think a bit late I wish we had experimented you know this you know long ago and the one which I think very few used and I think we used a lot is actually Gplus the Gplus grew so well it was in the end you know bigger than the twitter followers we did not get a whole lot of in our referral from the Gplus but the number of people who are interacting are often each post the like in the plus ones and the commenting on that page was very nice or the twitter I feel the engagement is not very good many people are you know seeing the tweet but the number of people who are giving the quality responses not a whole lot but it is very high on Facebook are you calling the opponent also no are you calling the opponent also no are you calling the opponent also okay look what we are doing yeah but he is so far again see the number of followers the number of followers he has is 17 million I don't know I forgot the number let's go back to this question this question was about did your campaign fall in competition yes no no because initially we had to and that's not happening but when the gap becomes huge okay I mean because there is not a much you are able to compare there is not any initially when we started the work we had a you know we were wondering on how can we increase his the following and we did all this you know you draw this graph that graph this thing and he goes once and he talks on the TV he on his own is getting so many new likes so we completely said we will not do anything for getting new fans for him because he himself gets questions this question was about what did other candidates say on their Twitter handle on their Facebook page actually I find it difficult to buy in your point of view is because of the fact when there was so much attention you have been volunteers trying to make sense of what at the grassroots level the issues I would be very surprised if you said you didn't pay attention to what another channel was saying on Twitter Facebook or on that part obviously what I would think you do that first and you will get a grasp you know what we were trying to read is what the entire ecosystem was talking see the entire ecosystem was huge where you get that see if you follow only one or two candidates the amount of the the data you get from them is not a whole lot but if you are looking into the entire ecosystem the amount of the thing you get feedback data is a lot more out of which you are able to make sense I am not saying anything that we were not looking at the competition at all or we were ignoring the competition but the number of updates what were happening on FB pages were very few of the candidates were you know the savvy or who were actually doing it okay so believe the discussion back to the as far as social beginners concerned especially Facebook started off very very well and brought about a lot of excitement given from the daily election that we want to take where it was used very effectively initially that people saw this and at the level of involvement of the middle class the Indian middle class with the political parties did increase initially but as the campaign progressed through the last couple of weeks we saw the animosity became very very harsh and this is something which certainly is something which you know people felt that it was in bad days because it kind of jokes or you know the images that were being circulated around on FB or Twitter or WhatsApp so this is something which you know created a lot of bad blood in terms of something where there has to be some kind of regulation I feel in the future where you know this kind of spoof that were made or it was irrespective of the parties has to be avoided if a campaign there is a certain decorum it would be more appreciable but unfortunately we saw the free for all kind of campaign where you know fun was made days were taken and that's something which social media certainly did not give you know the kind of grace to assess it is a member of the family I would probably ask your opinion on how do you see especially the election commission have a handle on this sort of chat there have been obviously different things happening so how did you think that they can help you see certainly this is something which needs to be looked at because it was not just making fun also this information campaign that was something which social media went to circle that where we saw a lot of wrong information was shared about questions distorted images of Muzaffar Nagar those kind of things which were spread you know like wildfire which only created you know a lot more polarization or a lot more hatred amongst people so that's where the election commission will now have to come and you know actually control couple simple had made reference to this in February but you know that he was bulldozed by the media in terms of you know how can you regulate the social media and all that don't you think satire is a very capable channel for effective propaganda satire and wrong information is different to the early part satire is different no but what happened distorted images of Muzaffar Nagar the first part that you mentioned I was just you know satire satire is a good thing in terms of you know just making fun of someone was fine it makes you register and you know the one plus point of the social media was that let's say there is a joke about Raab Gandhi or if there is a joke about Modi you have the tendency of sharing it with friends so it had the multiplier effect if you saw any satire in television in the mainstream media or you saw a cartoon from newspaper you cannot share it with someone you can read it enjoy it and leave it but if I get a cartoon on my phone I have the tendency that you know I should get my friends to know it so that one advantage did work for the media because you know they were very creative in terms of you know having the first mover advantage to be able to spread those kind of things but later on you know you know your script is a very evil word you know because it's not a serious question it's everybody who wants to bring up the script was it your idea the whole circuit self-conceived I am going to even bring up the features I am going to bring up the mother's script when he was busy doing the self-conceived that was my understanding but I am just asking was it something that your team thought for him that every now and then you know I don't know I do not allow that question because it's not about technology let's keep this focus on technology these are part of the script I have a question how are those humongous number of volunteers who came to work how were they instructed to use this issue were there any clear instructions definitely to start this I think one should update the government each of the party had to inform them the candidates official accounts and the sports the persons searching also the accounts so all those accounts were actually scanned if I were a sportsman if I told something about another person the government would punish me but surely the people for I would say for all the parties I am sure they had the guidance but you know the country is so large each guy has his own mind I am not speaking about the election commission I am just asking about the campaign strategy as in if the government asked me how are volunteers to volunteer for the campaign were there any specific instructions I would not say that he told all those people that you need to be on twitter you need to go to his page and hit the button for all the sports everyday I mean all those things you are not doing at all those things are not doing but surely there were few people who would say that I want to volunteer in the social media group for example if I want to be part of the group then we would inform them you know the line mates they can use even on their own upon giving they are not doing anything for the party I mean you have to be comfortable I have a question to the panel another small question there was also a lot of fashion going on all kinds of for again all parties then how was this app handled what was that can you give an example how did you use it a lot of one comment that you would get up we are coming to that so we talked about the different types of social media tools and how art is used so one of the things that I want to touch on is obviously this is what she is sort of leading to is the signal to noise so how did you folks open that's part of your migration different types of tools how much of it did you target my strategy how much of it you started reacting to based on update because I am really keen on it so could be that's the problem so if you have a question maybe the first question was more in terms of signal to noise so let's open that so specifically for example in our campaign although we originally had this concept that we want to get digital volunteers that people are not otherwise willing to other things but only on social media we actually got very few people and most of our likes or Twitter followers and all came sort of more organically in fact we never being a ground camping we are always so much sort of people on the ground that whoever comes you try to nothing like a live conversation converting a voter and as a result I think we were just I think the pull of our candidate maybe we got great traction on Facebook and Twitter but it was not sort of us kind of giving directions to our volunteers to go and do certain things out there the other thing was also the signal to noise ratio we never encouraged any of our volunteer for maintaining decorum we were I don't think we my question is on your Facebook you don't have good signal good feedback coming in the comments coming to construct it at the same time you don't have lots of general noise like what's it called what's it called flash essentially really not very much okay just outright rude and out of behavior so you brought a user but Twitter it's also self policing to certain extent other people dump on the guy and they are being unnecessarily nasty how did you how did you go about tackling this one I'm interested in did you have a code team just monitoring it to see what signal was actually you have somebody watching those channels to say hey I'm passing some new parody of something someone's spreading some misinformation someone's having a satire or there's this nice joke going around satire is good my question is not about what it's about how did you what kind of teams went behind it how did you go about tackling we monitored Facebook very closely of course you can't monitor every post but to the extent whatever was visible we made sure that you know it was sort of so it's also another point in terms of not exactly on your websites or on your official web pages but then things that went viral and it's a public available for consumption so this is where you have to have you know if you have good political strategies this is where you would monitor or you would see what is happening then how did you handle these things how did they tackle those things that went viral where you won't have it on your official page but then you have it as a public video or a public one thing I just said this ecosystem is very huge it's very hard to know where what is happening but when you use some of the tools and somewhere somebody posted and if it actually it trended or something like that and it went viral the tools will be able to say that some you post you know it got a lot of activity so for any candidate any party you know they will be receiving good stuff the best of all is ok if it is deconstructive the one which you get upset is abusive and this and that so you know you have to learn to ignore the one which you need to be very careful is if they you cross the line they will threaten your life ok then you need to see how serious this is so on the lighting note on the big day I think there is a body the fifth elephant is saying develop a this and then just go so what is the strategy to influence the undecidable for example a modem what for modem you would not be so sure this comment should be more promulgated how did you come in the undecidable see I think you know the only way was for us to be you know spreading about you know what his views was about you know so many things like either say the the security you know we should have the post when I say security not the big data security the national security ok so you know yes you see so you know one for the youth the jobs so like that you know we had the the post ok and some information and the amount of information was on his blog which were he had made a public about the government reports which showed that in so on so he you know his state achieved this so that is the only thing we can do you put the facts ok and from there you have to see about what we have let me rephrase some of the questions did you have a team kind of had a counter campaign if there was a negative campaign of some kind or you just let it go as you know I mean you know you know I am sure everybody speaks about it but I cannot show you at least in his team you know all those things are I didn't mean to use see the thing is for any party let me tell you for any party or any of the candidates sometimes you have some hard core supporters on which you do not have any good vote some day somewhere he feels very strong about him or her so he will be you know firing the bullets in all directions he can't do anything about it so you know if he come to know about it and if somebody say that XYZ is going there either they announce that he is not actually part of the team and if he has got some sometimes we inform them you know on twitter that you have to hold on or something but you see there are some people who make a noise the number of followers they have he is like 5, 10, 15 if it is only he and his himself who is you know you are fantasizing that he is making a difference that's the only the lady has a question guys she is asking she is asking she is asking yeah got the point yeah if it is a question of policy he is not a scope of this discussion if it is a question of technology he is like you know he will not rephrase a question about technology and fine see I tell you sure let me tell you I tell you you know the party in its mind could ask their official volunteers to be sitting and you know abusing people I am telling you and also is it happening on the twitter or on FB because on the twitter I am telling I can open an account and I can put any name I want and I can say that I am a supporter of XYZ I mean not people I am from you know the arrival party but I will claim I am a supporter in the profile and I will be back I understand that see I am telling you the official volunteers would not do it right but if you have sent a message that I who am an official volunteer I am doing it this action will be taken definitely you know if we know an official volunteer is taking up social media social media this one I over here from a different perspective the fact that this is the first time that we saw social media overtaking the mainstream media and this is something where we realize that you know even mainstream television media specifically say wanted to encash on the story that you saw on the English channel had a written that they wanted it to be you know about that and this is something which clearly shows the growth of social media in the pace at which it is growing just to give you a small comparison the social media this time was about six times more bigger than the television media this is something which political parties realize that you know it is not just enough to send to televisions it is more important to be there with the social media because one as it was much bigger compared to television and mainstream media this time was forced to follow social media what do you think is the next time is the engagement of the past reach after after each of the rallies obviously you capture our Facebook posts as well as Twitter and Instagram and there is some way that you identify the emotions because they are positive, negative what I must say is that all that had to be given manually while every the two always said they are able to capture the sentiment of the update I think they completely failed on it so we realized it had to be done manually so I mean to some extent we were able to say that some are positive some are negative then again we had to see through seeing that what it was so would you be in a position to share the little detail on the side of the publicity agenda yeah I inform great you know the brackets is one of the one tools which we used and you know I think the other groups they used you know SAP I think they used SAP and the radiance specifically for social media we used whatever tools were provided on the website we didn't go beyond that we did Google analytics for the other companies yes that kind of thing thank you some organization that you mentioned that you provided as a report to Modi that is a pretty important task that is you did that entirely manually because of what he told there is some amount of automation we can do but we can't simply feed it into that thing and send the output you were saying that you probably have to use the first level for the tools some amount of automation some amount of surely automatic collecting the information itself is very different we can't do that manually that's from the tool we can do for each of the posts we are able to so download and you know the cleanups and all of it in case of number around how many we still have to manually go to or post summarization, post cleanups no no they are coming for if you know obviously we are related to the size of the rail it goes to small town it's a big town you have all of that and it is also about what he speaks if it is something that hits you then the amount of the reaction you get is 1 but it is like you know sometimes you know 20,000, 20,000 easy, I mean that is a low number I am talking about I know this is a very exciting topic so I just like to get into two more questions and then go ahead so far we covered how they use different tools in social media how they view the signal and noise there were some questions on how they view things like hate speech and stuff like that sensitive analysis and the like so we touched upon a little bit in terms of what I call use cases and how they use this the main thing that we talked about is engaging the point that is the main use case and in some cases I did hear about getting digital volunteers or finding people who can help the party in the real world or otherwise when are the use cases going to be used in social media or any other use cases then come to your mind that decides these two I mean the whole point of campaign is persuasion persuading voters like your poor ways to vote for you and the swing voters to make up their minds help them provide them with information that they may need to come change their minds and work for you so to that extent it is a communication medium just like regular media you know like J.G. mentioned that you know there is an amplification effect so for us it was largely a communication tool and of course you know like someone looking at what our opposition is doing you know following their activities online you know you get a lot of information just because they put it online I mean you don't have to follow them because they are going but they put it up themselves so that's kind of nice but beyond that any other use cases for us the most important use of this was the crowdsourced very well are you planning to use this platform for the future for running the governance? yes I mean he is already in the paper he has already launched a the program where every resident he is asking them to volunteer for the country one week or two weeks in a row every year not in a stretch every week after so that is happening here it was the audience to not ask party specific question to you this was the government platform this was the government this is the purpose of the elections not look forward look back thank you you should be very balanced because the monitor parties on the monitor I have two other questions perhaps you wrap up any questions we can open it up two questions one which is in terms of what would you think are the top three challenges each of your campaigns based from the top of your mind in terms of dealing with this beast of social play what do you think are the top three challenges we don't want to get into how you tackle it more in terms of top of the mind challenges the challenges in a few fields I would say is to understand the demographic of the user that we were able to have a better fee so you wouldn't know whether the gender age group you know all of that so technology provides in my opinion the tools which are out there which means to happen is still a lot a lot of sentiment analysis and see the example if we do come to know a particular article or a particular post or tweet started going viral sometimes you don't know the cost from where it happened so why it happened so that becomes and we saw that sometime about 3-4 months ago the amount of the graphic which was coming into the site the boone had spiked so the reason we don't know what about you any learnings that you would call it so nothing particularly challenges I mean already things were touched upon problems of spam some volunteers getting whatever like I mean crazy bad language I mean I wish that there were better ways to control some of these things but it's just a big problem wasn't the magnitude of because for us to handle the fee it's important to regulate especially because it's shown the damage it can the election commission for example if you wanted to put a video in the last few days of the campaign and we had to take it to the election commission you know stand in the PDMP office then the officer watch the video then they took it secretly to put a stamp on it because it was done locally in fact it was also quite fast but the process is like I'm putting a seal on a CDL you'll have to use that seal okay whatever but there's a lot of regulations hate speech on regular media what you can't do cannot report all that but social media it buys very nature there's always the worry that you'll over-regulate it and there's those concerns but these kinds of concerns that the campaign has to stop 48 hours for the digital but you know in the print on the day of the voting also you can have an ad so I don't understand that that's a very fair question last question for me which is you guys have a lot of experience on joining your campaign this year especially on social media if you look at all your learnings and if you had to do things differently for your next campaign if you had to do a few things approach things differently would it be like the way you organize your teams or the way you look at at this point I'm pretty happy I think the key thing about social media is that the platform Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn to a small extent because all of these have sort of created natural tools for you to disseminate your message that actually they go all the hard work for you if you look at it they'll make sure that people who might be interested in politics will automatically end up seeing a post somewhere in the field at some point so a lot of the hard work actually the platforms put behind you from our side I guess it's just as more and more people get online I think the teams have to be larger coordination has to be larger more reporting it's more of everything but I don't foresee doing anything very differently from what we live in this right now yeah I will answer the question yeah so I'm sure in the the follow up on say elections if it's the state in view of what everybody has seen I think the scale of operations will increase especially if it is across the country so I think that is only from one office to be doing for the country it may be a little bit different so the way I see is that the planning in this field it can be a little hard it was a large extent who are the people who are going to get the tickets usually you know only 15 days then all the messages the campaign material all that needs to happen so you can't do the planning for all the candidates like 6 months in a row all this happens in a very very long time see from the voters perspective what it seems to be we have seen the power of social media it's time that even voters will have to come across the community based group to be able to get more information about the kind of work or the way in which the media is supposed to wait for the media to come to be able to get the criminal cases of the aged person and those kind of information so maybe from that aspect we evaluate the candidate better the voters or even the leadership commission will have to do something where the media can be used more strongly to be able to give a clearer picture and a more transparent view that's the problem the power of Facebook Facebook also Facebook I think they sell ads in this campaign yeah so they're all in that way the party is buying these ads I think everybody has been I think I've asked that we saw one particular candidate so Facebook in a way the ads are very good because we are able to target the region, the gender, the age group the profession so one of the big talking points of this election was the amount of money that was going to happen so technology was supposed to be level but from what we are getting it is bridging the gap for example the candidate with lots of money technology based campaign rather than somebody who is not happy so how do you see that gap getting pushed in the future so technology down its own it just won't be complimenting or whatever you can't replace the door to door having this question is a little more dramatic this question is more about money and technology so it's like is having more money makes you use more technology what's this question you need a certain amount of I don't think just because you spend more money you spend more technology I actually think it's a slightly more advanced question you know so when the web was new and blogging was new one of the things that I said about it was that it gave publishing to the masses everybody now goes in the same level and it seems like that's not the case now there are better users of technology and weaker users of technology and there is a clear difference in the effectiveness actually it's the other way I mean depending on you look at the app example in Delhi I think app is a phenomenon of social I mean you know they is just a product of social media today I mean and without that I mean I doubt that they would have been able to make the dent that they have made you know what's the problem the nature of elections is very different at the ground level what we've seen in the past is abuse of money part you know where you have liquor distributed money is distributed I will tell you from personal example the Karanidhi election in 2011 in Tamil Nadu on an average 5 crores foreign and military constituency was given by the party that's the kind of money which went into that kind of distribution end result they did not even get about 10 seats so that's kind of you know see what happens over here with the social media and the growth that we've seen the 10% gradually the Karanidhi parties are going to realize that whether you will put money into the wrong thing or you will put money into the right things you will see that way is a far better investment I would call it instead of you know just dumping money where you are able to communicate you are able to think but for this spoof spam if there is a better regulation this is going to be a more cost effective way than the kind of rallies, posters, piracy the other important thing about this media is the candidate or the party is in control of the platform so sometimes what happens is the TV or the they depict only some one word what you use in the full speech and they completely slice and dice and does that but here at least whatever you wanted to say the whole thing will at least be there for the record that things will happen people will loop it one sentence and they will bang on that so that is it I have an add on to what they said to the wrong question I think it's not as much as how much money they had because if that was the case every potential MP in this company would have had the best site and would have had the best form of communication because they all have money most of them hold record so I think it's not as much about money path to apply technology it's more about what we discussed through this discussion about use cases or how you are applying it to either reach your water or all your currency at least more about applied use cases and how you are applying it so it's all finding the right guy to use the money that you have to apply the technology first perhaps that's the answer does the technology expense does the technology expense also include into the maximum limit for a company I think they have already covered that most of it is done before the organization so one question is the campaign spending limited only after nomination from the year combination basically has no meaning at all also there are many questions to the panel I have a question to the audience on social media so I have a question to the audience I mean forget the panelist for a moment do folks experience the social media or how they use technology as a whole how many of you think that it was effective in you understanding either the party better raise your hands it's about the message I mean how many of you form your opinion based on the technology I think it all depends on what kind of how many of you thought that that campaigns of technology helped you form your opinion well how much of it was broadcast media it wasn't only that it helped solidify so in my case I had no connection my use was entirely which means I just have one point to add I think it has already created this was the more why I asked to watch Modi because he was the one who was maximum using I tell the last two three phases so I think a lot of it came from one particular media on social media at least and then others jumped in and started using it a lot more so that way it is a little biased to answer this question my question is very general I mean it's about how did you form your opinion what do you see input came from majority party if you form an opinion it's okay my question is very beautiful the decision did it help you it would be very few I think this question the social media campaign I don't have a connection or before that because for me it would have completed two different steps because I don't have a connection I feel that this is mass marketing but before the election the natural organ is sharing from my friends that gave me perspective of some corrections happening or some things happening this day is not really good but once the election started but what opinion I got out of it was I figured out both my friends were suffering which part is it except that no other educated case I could make for the planned campaign but before that natural campaign people sharing corruption and all that that gave me perspective of which kind of agreement which part is it okay what was the question how did you actually download in the party apps on your mobile phones show hands nobody what did you do I mean we thought about this and people said they will do it they will download an app okay that is why I am going to see Satay as such especially I saw a hundred types I thought a hundred times very closely because I followed Satay I think Satay is an extremely potent weapon for campaigning because a hundred times guys are kind of BJP supporters Fabulous Jappar all of the Satay and psych politicians have been beautiful messengers which I think and it is a huge and people love it also one more thing that I was really excited about was you look at now connecting these referendums that seems to be improved now that is what I am going to show you but they are not actually actually westerners like Rajeev Rajeev is such a great world stat great starting a big mindful of time we need to wrap up so any last two questions from the audience because I need to know from the technology perspective and more from the involvement perspective whether any people in both your party your campaign improves we are only focused on technology we wanted to get involved more and did not have a bias towards the party we have people like that here actually I should say to you the people who I worked with over here whom we actually hired there is this separate team so even before we had in the interview we clearly told it's for whom because you do have few people who would say I want to come out for him I don't want to work for him or I am okay I don't want to cross anybody who would say I don't want to but actually you know quite sharp this campaign office you know it was so no actually profiled we did not have any photos we didn't have any flags even on the day of the results we were just doing the work we did not have the business it's not a business no because at least I was a volunteer that was not a business I know what is the that was there when we were shooting the Obama campaign people who sent the parties around the holidays and they sold to me as a handrails I would like to you guys consider looking into that yeah that's something that we have to do so he's doing that so I don't have to share So we did this work earlier than we started for fourth-line technologies and we'll see how this pans out. Alright, I'm not taking any more questions but I'm going to give the panelists an opportunity to give the overall summary comments on technology and its use in the election or maybe some forward-looking takes as you may want to give the next one minute each for me. So I don't think I have anything more to add than I think we've had a fabulous discussion thanks to your participation. But if I had to sum it up, I think the numbers speak for themselves. Maybe 25% of the people are online in this election and the next national election will probably see 50 or 75% online. I don't know what that number is. And as more and more people are online, as fewer and fewer people consume traditional media or are reachable through traditional news, there is no alternative but for campaigns to use technology to reach out to voters to communicate their message and present a professional phase. So I just think we're getting started and we'll see how the future goes. So for me and the people who worked with me, I would say it was a fantastic opportunity to work with somebody who had a vision on what had to be done. And in the future when the technology moves, I think it will only increase the social media and the blogging as a medium. I mean that is something they can't afford to ignore especially after it has been approved. But is it something on which you can only bank on social media alone to win an election? I think that would be a surprise. Well, I just want to give you a little joke. The fact is that, you know, social media plays such a crucial role that Rahul Gandhi wanted the number of MPs to do below 50 so that he could create a WhatsApp role. Any other comments? So I thought we'd just take a minute or two to summarize the very, very enlightening discussion. I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you so much for your wonderful perspectives. Some great questions from the audience which made many of us think more deeply. My overall take on this whole thing is that it looks like technology is here to stay. And I feel that parties are still discovering how to really leverage the various different types of technology tools and the forms of social media and probably learning as they go in research. Some of them have been early adopters and have had good success with others coming in and trying to create similar things as well. But I would say that it's very evident from today's discussion that they still get to define and determine more and more use cases that they can apply. They seem to have some preliminary success in some of the use cases. If you look at it in terms of how they're using it internally to target campaigns or in terms of how they're getting people in the field to do, this is like they talked about the general campaign where they had some iPads given out, smartphones being used. I think that some of these early wins perhaps get standardized in subsequent campaigns. And I think they've also probably spent a lot of time in terms of how they maximize the resources that they have in terms of benefits that they get from these various channels. I think this would have been a huge learning for them and I think they would continue to fancy how they can maximize the impact of these channels. I would say a lot of the signal-to-noise thing that we talked about maybe would have reacted to many of these, but honestly as well, because some of them pointed out that it was difficult even to predict how to respond to some of those. And I think there were also some interesting regulatory aspects which I think Vijay nicely touched upon in terms of what do the regulators do in terms of leading the different forms of technology. And of course there's this big problem of scale and language which anyway we continue to have in this country. We continue to stay in the realm of this. So it looks like there will be more exciting times on how technology will be used in future campaigns and elections. And I hope you enjoyed this whole session and I hope you enjoyed myself. Thank you everyone for being here and thanks to the organizers that has given us the opportunity to put this together. On a closing note, just want to remind you, maybe my brother just put a camera there. We have the upcoming huge fifth elephant big-leader conference at Hasgip Runs. It's an annual event with Iran and it's maybe one of just to say a couple of words about it before we wrap up. Thank you again for the opportunity. So the fifth elephant is a conference on big data and analytics. It's mostly about what tools are available to deal with large volumes of data and what you do with those tools. So we look at storage, covering databases, current trends in most secret databases or secret databases or columnar databases and so forth. As one aspect of the event, another aspect is the analytics side of it. How do you process very large volumes of data? Two years ago you would have said Hadoop is the way to do it. Nowadays you say Hadoop is too slow, you need something that's more real-time. What do you do now? And so that's essentially the focus of this year's edition. This year is mostly about real-time analytics. How do you respond really quickly when you see a trend in your data? By really quickly I mean like within a minute or something showing up in your data. That's largely the focus of this year's edition. So it's on July 25 and 26 at the conference and 23 and 24 is the workshops. There are two days of workshops and two days of hundreds. So where is it? The conference is at the Rehansi Commission Center and the workshops will be at Karimitsk. So thank you very much again and maybe I'll make a lot of applause for the past five days. So that almost brings us to the end of our session today. So I'm just left with the last of thanking our delegates here. So when we are from Asking, we are thinking in the lines of having an event, an event for Twitter event basically. We had a clear thing in front of us, the 2014 elections. As you saw, the 2014 elections was well highly pitched in regard to social media, data technology, much higher-pitched than any of the previous editions. So we were pretty sure that we will have a really nice evening having all these people here. So let me start by thanking the party-based panelists who gave an unbiased review of how technology was actually used to power their campaigns. We had a lot of insights, like a lot of first-time things, like how technology was used for the first time to do some specific tasks, like little mentioned, reaching out to 400,000 people in a matter of just 6-7% Facebook and like Mahesh mentioned, monitoring around thousands of volunteers through just WhatsApp and things like that. So thank you both of you for sharing your wonderful insights and then again, Vijay for giving an overall view outside of the perspective of how things were actually running in the current election scenario. So thank you all three of the panelists, a round of applause for them. Mainly the villain of the evening, I was seeing from that view. He turned out to be the Dark Knight. He was showing stop signs for almost everyone of you, me first, then you. So that's the way it should have been done, because I especially thank Arun for converting this event into a much more interactive one and not the usual lines of ending up in a Mahendra Modi versus Arun Gandhi aspect. So thank you Arun for moderating this session. And last but not the least, I thank all of you for coming, finding time on a Friday evening, like he mentioned. This was spending time in a proper which family. Next time we can hold this event in a proper, I think. The talk will be something different. So thanks a lot guys for spending your time. And yes, thanks to C.A.S. also for hearing us. I want a full venue to go this evening. Thanks a lot. And before we wind up, I just have a few news for our panel members. So how do we go up with it? Adaptation for the Dark Knight? Yes. And how do we move? I'll go the right. Yes. So you have the right. I totally advise right when you will see. Just as the way you are profiled master, you have to do that. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for the one. Thank you. We just have some samosas and things here, because you have a long way to go. Welcome to our guest. Many questions. Yes. They're still around. On the samosas. I think I have to catch up right now. Thank you. No, no, no.