2023 ISIF Asia award winners announced!

The 2023 ISIF Awards will recognize three exceptional contributions to Internet development working to advance Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in the Asia Pacific region.

The award includes USD 5,000 as well as a travel grant to join the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Kyoto, Japan. The awards ceremony will be on 9 October.

The three awardees are:

The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) for their work on software-defined IXPs – the award is being accepted by project lead Zartash Afzal Uzmi.

The Myanmar Internet Exchange (MMIX) for their work on supporting networks in Myanmar – the award is being accepted by project lead Thein Myint Khine.

The University of Malaya, for the design, development and operation of an SDN-based Internet eXchange playground for Networkers – the award is being accepted by project lead Dr Ling Teck Chaw.

The Foundation congratulates these three award winners for the work they are doing to enhance the operations and sustainability of IXPs in the Asia Pacific.

Announcing the ISIF Asia Awards 2022!

You are invited to join us in celebrating this year’s ISIF Asia Awardees!  

The 2022 awards will be presented at the APNIC54 conference during the APNIC Foundation conference session, and you can join the session in person or online, by following the information about the session on the conference program.

The ISIF Asia Awards were first introduced in 2011 to celebrate the outstanding organizations and individuals supporting community needs through innovative uses of Internet technologies. Awardees receive USD 5,000 and support to attend the APNIC54 conference in Singapore. 

This year’s awards will recognize two exceptional contributions:

The Network coded tunnels for satellite links project, led by the University of Auckland (New Zealand) that lets remote island communities in the Pacific make more efficient use of the satellite Internet connections they rely on. Project leader Dr. Ulrich Speidel will accept the award.

The Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform, designed by Swiss German University (Indonesia), collects, categorizes, and distributes cybersecurity threat information from malicious traffic discovered in partner “honeypots” around the world. Project leader Dr. Charles Lim, will accept the award.

We look forward to seeing you at the Foundation session at APNIC54!  

On International Women’s Day, calling for gender empowerment and innovation initiatives to apply to ISIF Asia

ISIF Asia has supported many wonderful women leading project teams during our 10 years of operations. We have also being lucky to support projects focusing on women’s health and economic empowerment. During 2018, and thanks t the support from IDRC, we are calling those working on Gender Empowerment and Innovation to apply for the grants and/or to nominate for the award. Applications are open now until 15 May 2018.

The Internet for Development Grants & Award for Gender Empowerment & Innovation will be allocated to projects/organizations working to achieve gender equality on the Internet industry, focusing on one or more of the following areas:

  • Building advanced digital skills among women and girls (coding, network management and security, IPv6, big data, sensors, IoT, devices, machine learning, cloud computing);
  • Supporting women to get involved in network infrastructure deployment to expand Internet access and adoption;
  • Encouraging the participation of women in digital markets to support women’s economic empowerment as well as capacity building initiatives that support employment paths in the Internet industry;
  • Promoting the safe use of the Internet for women and girls
  • Defending women and girls rights online.
I4D for Gender Empowerment and Innovation Grants
For projects working to achieve gender equality in the Internet industry.
2x USD 30,000 to scale up existing projects
1x USD 23,000 for a new project
Apply now
I4D for Gender Empowerment and Innovation Award
For projects with demonstrated impact to achieve gender equality in the Internet industry.
1x USD 3,500 Apply now

Before you submit your Award nomination, please read the nomination requirements.

Before you submit your grant proposal, please read the ISIF Asia Frequently Asked Questions, Guidelines for Grant Applications, and Selection Criteria.

2018 ISIF Asia Grants and Awards marks 10th anniversary of the grants program

ISIF Asia opens its 2018 call for grants and awards in the tenth year of its operation in the Asia Pacific. In total, funding of USD 210,000 will be shared among winning grants and awards for innovative uses of Internet technologies that support social and economic development in the Asia Pacific.

Applications are open now until 15 May 2018.

Grants

Grants are provided to projects that support research on Internet operations, infrastructure, technologies and protocols within the Asia Pacific region. USD 194,000 will be available for funding across the following four grant categories.

Grant Funding Apply
Cybersecurity Grants:

For projects working on practical solutions supporting Internet resiliency and network security. More information.

2x USD 30,000 to scale up existing projects

1x USD 13,000 for a new project

Apply now
I4D for Community Networks Grants:

For projects developing affordable, locally owned and managed communication infrastructure, deploying creative low-cost solutions that use wireless technologies, GSM and/or fibre connections. More information.

1x USD 30,000 to scale up existing projects

1x USD 23,000 for a new project

Apply now
I4D for Gender Empowerment and Innovation Grants:

For projects working to achieve gender equality in the Internet industry. More information.

2x USD 30,000 to scale up existing projects

1x USD 23,000 for a new project

Apply now
Internet Operations Research Grant:

For projects supporting the development of an independent Internet research community whose work can improve the availability, reliability and security of the Internet in the Asia Pacific, and widen its coverage, applications and benefit to the community. More information.

2x USD 30,000 to scale up existing projects

1x USD 15,000 for a new project

Apply now

Awards

ISIF Asia awards recognize the positive contributions of project winners with a cash prize of USD 3,500 and a travel grant to attend the 2018 Internet Governance Forum (USD 16,000 in total), where the awards ceremony will take place.

Categories

  • I4D Award for Community Networks
  • I4D Award for Gender Empowerment and Innovation

More information

Visit the website for more information about key dates and how to apply.

Before you submit your Award nomination, please read the nomination requirements.

Before you submit your grant proposal, please read the ISIF Asia Frequently Asked Questions, Guidelines for Grant Applications, and Selection Criteria.

ISIF Asia at the Internet Governance Forum 2017

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) brings together representatives from civil society, academia, private sector, government and the technical community as equals, to discuss about public policy issues relating to the development of the Internet. It is a unique space that informs and inspires. The IGF facilitates a common understanding of how to maximize Internet opportunities and address risks and challenges that arise. The IGF 2017 starts officially tomorrow in Geneva, Switzerland, and today a series of pre-events set the tone for the discussions that will take place from 18 to 21 December 2017 an the UNOG building.

IGF 2017
IGF 2017

ISIF Asia has hosted its awards ceremony at the Internet Governance Forum since 2011, and most recently as a joint ceremony with the Seed Alliance regional partners, FRIDA and FIRE Africa. For this year, the Seed Alliance partners have organized 3 sessions, all running on Monday 18 December:

  1. At 9:00 am in Room XXVI – E the Seed Alliance Open Forum will be sharing with the community what the Seed Alliance is, and the work of FIRE, FRIDA and ISIF Asia to support innovation on Internet development. In particular, the Seed Alliance will be focusing on its gender programming, ahead of the 2018 plans to have a specific funding category across the 3 regions to fund gender and technology projects.
  2. At 11:50 am in Room XXII – E a round table will discuss how devices, content & innovative business models shape our digital future. The workshop speakers will discuss how the business models behind content and services as well as infrastructure development (devices and networks) has a direct impact on how we can achieve the goal to connect the next billion to enhance opportunities to all.
  3. Then at 1:30 pm in room Room XXVI – E the Seed Alliance Awards ceremony will take place and 6 amazing projects will be presented. Please join us to acknowledge the great contributions each and everyone of them is doing for our digital future. The ISIF Asia award winner from Indonesia, PetaBencana.ID will be among these amazing group.

The Seed Alliance will also have a booth at the IGF Village, so please come to meet the award winners and learn more about their work, and the work of the regional partners to support innovation across the global south.

Then, on Tuesday 19 at 10:10 am in Room IX – A, Duncan Macintosh (CEO of the APNIC Foundation) will be sharing about the Foundation support for cybersecurity projects, included those funded during the ISIF Asia 2016 and 2017 grants at the session Cybersecurity: Balancing security, openness, and privacy.
On Wednesday 20, the Global Information Society Watch 2017 on National and Regional Internet Governance Forums will be launched at 1:30 pm in Room XXV – E. ISIF Asia supported the development of this resource, as an important tool to capture the diversity and richness of IG discussions around the world.

As co-chair of the APrIGF, I also would like to invite you to join the presentation of the APrIGF Synthesis Document, on Thursday 21 at 9:00 am at Room XXII – E. The document, developed through a community process online produce a collaborative outputs of the discussions held at the last APrIGF in Bangkok, a remarkable effort lead by the APrIGF secretariat.

Many ISIF Asia grant and award winners are actively involved at the IGF and organizing or speaking at different workshops. Here are some of the few:

Rafi can now read on his own

Saifuddin Rafi reading at home using the digital talking books
Saifuddin Rafi reading at home using the digital talking books

Saifuddin Rafi, one of the four million visually impaired people in Bangladesh, is studying in class XI at Patiya Government College in Chittagong. His study started in a specialized school (Government Muradpur School for the Blind) in Chittagong. But, after completing primary level, he got admitted into ‘Union Krishi School and College’ in Patiya nearby his home town. During his secondary education level, in this mainstream school, he did not get textbooks in Braille or accessible audio format. He had to traverse jumpy situations due to absence of accessible study materials.

These difficulties required support from his sister, also a student with her own burden, who assisted him by recording all the books and class notes. The sufferings of his parents were also countless. A child with visual impairment needs extra privileges for continuing education; but the access to study materials required and their affordability is perplexing. Therefore, parents wishing their children to continue their studies face physical, mental and financial stresses.

For Rafi, difficulties to get accessible study materials needed for visually impaired students was a major challenge, and it troubled him and his family till class VIII. While studying in class IX, he received textbooks in audio format. Later he came to know that these were called DAISY-standard digital talking books.

DAISY Multimedia Talking Book
DAISY Multimedia Talking Book

The digital talking books are accessible materials which provide the text in an audio version for all including students with print and learning disabilities. Digital talking books are for everyone who needs accessible information; readers can play the audio and simultaneously display and highlight the corresponding text. It eases the education for the number of visually impaired students in Bangladesh like Rafi.

A team of persons with disabilities developed DAISY standard digital multimedia books, e-books and digital braille books for the primary and secondary levels using open source technology which are freely available for the end user. The project received technical support from DAISY Consortium, Accessible Books Consortium and WIPO, while receiving implementation support from Young Power in Social (YPSA) and overall support from the Service Innovation Fund of the Access to Information (a2i) programme under the Prime Minister’s Office in Bangladesh. The project has converted all primary and secondary education textbooks (grades I through X) into cost effective DAISY digital multimedia format; made it easier to produce braille, text, audio book or e-book as suitable.

These accessible and affordable reading materials brought a momentous shift in Rafi’s learning curve. Through receiving Grade Point Average (GPA) 5, the highest grade obtainable for secondary and higher secondary education system in Bangladesh, in his Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examination, Rafi has created an example for other visually impaired students who are struggling for their study fighting against their disabilities.

This project has won multiple awards for developing these multimedia talking books, for the expansion of the accessibility of digital publications with innovative models and practices. The most remarkable awards include the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prize, 2017; the Zero Projects Award on Inclusive Education (2016); the Accessible Books Consortium Award for Accessible Publishing Initiative at the International Excellence Award 2015 held in London Book Fair; etc.

 

 

 

 

Among them the Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF Asia) Award, 2014 was the first prestigious international recognition for the digital talking book project and greatly inspired the team behind the project. These funds and awards actually made the ground more secure for further efforts and development in creating accessibility for all in
education.

Surely, these appreciations are significant as both stimulus and outcome of the project. Yet, the main purpose of the project was to enable the students and people with various disabilities. So, the outcome should be measured by the aid, reduction of hassle and indicators of success of the beneficiaries. More than 100,000 students with visual disability, print disability and learning disability can now read and listen to their textbooks that significantly improve their learning now.

The Access to Information (a2i) programme is continuously working on accessible education for the visually impaired. Low-cost digital braille display and low-cost DAISY multimedia book players are being developed locally to read these DAISY digital talking books. Bangladesh wants to make people with disabilities resilient rather than ‘assumed liability’ of the society. Ensuring inclusion of all including people with disabilities, especially in education, will aid human-centric and sustainable development of Bangladesh.

The education and life as a whole for Rafi and his family, representative of thousands of beneficiary households, has become much easier these days. Rafi can use either smartphone or computer to access his reading materials.

By Robert Mitchell, APNIC

With nominations for the ISIF Asia Awards 2016 now open, we thought we’d check back with some of our previous award winners to understand how the award benefitted their projects and get some advice on what to include in your nominations.

Khairil Yusof is the cofounder and coordinator of the Sinar Project, which received an ISIF Asia Grant in 2013 in recognition of their work using open source technology and applications to systematically make important information public and more accessible to the Malaysian people.

Established in 2011, the Sinar Project aims to improve governance and encourage greater citizen involvement in the public affairs of the nation by making the Malaysian government more open, transparent and accountable.

Sinar project in action
Sinar project in action

What are the benefits of these kinds of Grants/Awards?

Here’s what Khairil had to say about ISIF Asia’s Grants and Awards:

These awards and grants recognize the difficult and highly technical work that a few civil society organizations do, which is often not understood or appreciated by other traditional awards or grants (for Rights) programs.

Also, being invited to an award ceremony at large event such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), provides you with lots of exposure in an environment where you can meet potential partners and donors that understand your work.

 

What were three key outcomes that the ISIF Asia Grant allowed you to achieve?

  1. The money from the Grant helped our part-time/volunteer effort to register as a proper organization.
  2. It also helped one of our founding members to work full time on funding applications.
  3. Attending the IGF in Turkey provided us with the opportunity to speak with potential donors, which eventually led to initial funding for the establishment of Malaysia’s first fledgling civic tech NGO, and allowed us to continue our work full time.

How has your project progressed after receiving the Grant?

The opportunity to showcase our work to donors led to further funding, which helped with consolidating open standards government data. In turn, this provided open data via REST APIs.

Other achievement include:

  • Powering Malaysia’s Open Parliament efforts [1,2] and the same in Myanmar [1, 2, 3]
  • Uncovering corruption and promoting transparency [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
  • A civil society led open data approach, combining civic tech and open data with traditional social audits
  • Starting a Digital Rights initiative backed by a team with technical capacity, and funded by Access. We are now building partnerships with the TOR Project to collect and report on network interference data and build Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) like alerts for digital rights incidents. We are also providing policy input on Internet and digital rights issues such as trade agreements

What should nominees include in their applications?

  1. Don’t be shy with sharing your methodology and the insights you’ve learned along the way, even if you might think it is trivial. If you’re a very technical team, run your methodology by non-technical friends or family members to get their insights. What you think is mundane, might be inspiring to others.
  2. Review all the outputs you have done; blogs, reports, software, photos, etc. If you’ve been passionately working on your ideas and project, you will be surprised at how much you have achieved. List the highlights in your proposal and reference the other outputs in an appendix or link.
  3. Do Google alerts for mentions and links to your project. It might feel a bit narcissistic, but again you might be surprised at who is referencing or mentioning your project internationally or is inspired by your project work.

Internet in Niue: evolution of our First ISIF Asia Award Winner

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Internet Niue will forever be remembered for being the first WiFi country. It’s Free WiFi initiative was a bold move especially on a small remote island in the South Pacific.
Back in the late 1990s, IUSN (Internet Users Society of Niue) a charitable organisation, applied and was later delegated as manager of the Niue .nu ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain) by IANA. As part of it’s goodwill offer, IUSN set out to provide free Internet access through an initiative called Internet Niue.  It began it’s limited services with dial-up and by 2003 it had started testing WiFi in downtown Alofi.
On 5 January 2004 Category 5 Cyclone Heta struck Niue with a force that ravaged the tiny island. Part of the capital was completely wiped out by the waves that rose over the 20m upraised coral cliffs.  As a result of this devastation, we had to rebuild our network infrastructure but with better understanding for the forces of nature as well as the environment that our wireless had to go through.
We worked with local organisations known as Village Councils (VC) and used their meeting halls as sites for our access points.  We also partnered with some private sector businesses and home owners to enable the distribution of WiFi to be extended across the narrow villages that followed the main road.  There’s no mountains or hills so we were able to utilise existing towers to install our major backhaul wireless links.  Initially we used empty cat food cans to build our antennaes and these worked well.  But advancements in design and technology including the decrease of prices in equipment have allowed us to extend further.  We now cover 13 of the 14 villages on the island of Niue.
A lot has changed since our first trial links back in 2003 but the vision has remained the same, to provide WiFi to the local communities.  For a long period, the island was able to enjoy free internet but as time passed, we had to adapt the way we operated to be able to cope with changes occurring in the domain name (TLD) world especially with the arrival of new gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains).  Our funding is dependent on the sales of the .nu domain names and we have had several years of having the luxury of free services. The main problem with the Free WiFi setup was that over time with the growth of users, the services was degraded.  So a change to the system was needed as we head into the future if we were going to survive.
By the beginning of 2016, plans were activated which allowed us to upgrade our satellite bandwidth with assistance from Speedcast. We started the new venture of charging people and built a system to become a commercial ISP, Kaniu (www.kaniu.nu). We still get subsidised with funding for the satellite bandwidth from IUSN but we’ve had to engage our users and charge them a fee of $50/unlimited per month to cover the local operations.  The uptake has been promising and we aim to continue offering more bandwidth to our users.
But when implementing these changes, the Government of Niue felt that we had violated some Niue Telecommunications laws and regulations and requested us to cease services. We adhered to that directive, even though we believed we had not broken any laws or regulations, and gave notification to our 600+ users as we turned off all our services in March 2016.  Users that benefited from the Internet access provided, voiced their concerns and later on the same evening we received the authorisation to resume our  services much to the delight of our users. We have continued to meet and discuss with the government what their concerns and requirements are as we intend to maintain our operations in Niue, in a small market that is developing.
We have invested a lot of effort and resources so we will continue to do what we do best.
ISIF Award
In 2011, Internet Niue won the ISIF Award for Localisation and Capacity Building. I was invited to Nairobi, Kenya to the IGF (Internet Governance Forum) to receive the Award. It was an amazing experience to meet other award winners and share with them, but there were far greater benefits that grew organically from it.
Personally, I was able to leverage the opportunity of winning the award and be able to participate and contribute to the regional PICISOC, Internet Society, ICANN (APRALO) as well as the Pacific IGF and New Zealand NetHui.  It has been an exciting journey but moreso the recognition for the work of Internet Niue and Rocket Systems both on the island and internationally.  It helped to grow my professional network and enabled my participation and exchange of ideas around the biggest issue in the Pacific Islands, specially for rural and remote locations: connectivity.  We have taken up the opportunity with Kacific’s upcoming service and we’re very excited that their first interim service is active in Vanuatu.  With this kind of an opportunity including the Hawaiki project underway, the future for our Pacific People looks promising and we can finally realise the dream of becoming more engaged in the digital economy.  Even though I still manage our Niue project, I have found more opportunities in the land of the long white clouds, Aotearoa New Zealand.  I am currently involved in the Makanet project that will see the use of the Kacific service to deliver broadband to rural and remote locations in New Zealand.  This will be a major undertaking and the potential to connect the under-served communities of New Zealand is similar to our own Pacific under-served communities.
The ISIF programme has assisted some great projects in the past and I’m sure it will continue to help others grow to greater heights.  So if you’re interested in using this great resource to develop and gain more exposure for your work, please don’t hesitate to apply at https://isif.asia/award
I’ll be happy to connect with anyone who is wanting more information about our ISIF Award experience as well as our ongoing projects in the Pacific.

ISIF Asia Award Winners for 2015 announced and Community Choice Award open

The Awards recognize initiatives from organizations that have already been implemented, or are in the final stages of implementation, and have been successful in addressing their communities’ needs.

During the 2015 call for nominations, four award winners were selected out of the 78 nominations received across four categories, covering 12 economies in the Asia Pacific. Proposals from Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand were assessed by the Selection Committee.

The commitment and continuous support from the Selection Committee to choose the best projects is key to provide legitimacy to this award. We thank Phet Sayo (IDRC), Gaurab Raj Upadhaya (APNIC EC), Rajnesh Singh (Internet Society), Edmon Chung (Dot Asia Organization), George Michaelson (APNIC staff), and David Rowe (ROWETEL, former ISIF Asia grant recipient) for their time, their comments and their eye for detail.

Each winner has received a cash prize of AUD 3,000 to support their work and a travel grant for a project representative to participate at the 10th Internet Governance Forum (Joao Pessoa, Brazil – November 2015) to participate at the awards ceremony, showcase their project, make new professional contacts, and participate in discussions about the future of the Internet.

This year was particularly interesting to receive an application from China, for the very first time since the inception of the ISIF Asia program.

31 applications were accepted for the selection process and are publicly available for anyone interested to learn more about the ingenuity and practical approaches that originate from our region. 16 applications were selected as finalists.

53% for nominations came from private sector and social enterprises, 24% from non-profits, 13% from the academic sector and 10% from government agencies.

The category that received more applications was Innovation on learning and localization with 38%, followed by Code for the common good with 28%, Rights 24% and Innovation on access provision 9%.

86% of the nominated projects are lead by men, only 14% lead by women.

One winner was awarded for each category, three from non-profits and one from private sector and three projects will be represented by women at the Awards Ceremony.

One of the four award winners will receive the Community Choice Award, an additional AUD 1000 for the project with more online votes from the community. The online vote opened on 9 September until 9 November. The winner of the Community Choice Award will be announced at the Awards ceremony. Cast your vote and support the winners!

DocHers  Batik Fractal  Jaroka  I change my city

Awards winners were selected in four categories, as follows:

  • Innovation on access provision: doctHERs – Pakistan, NAYA JEEVAN. doctHERs is a novel healthcare marketplace that connects home-restricted female doctors to millions of underserved patients in real-time while leveraging technology. doctHERs circumvents socio-cultural barriers that restrict women to their homes, while correcting two market failures: access to quality healthcare and women’s inclusion in the workforce. doctHERs leapfrogs traditional market approaches to healthcare delivery and drives innovative, sytems change.
  • Code for the common good: Batik Fractal – Indonesia, Piksel Indonesia Company. Piksel Indonesia is creative social enterprise founded in 2007 and registered as legal entity in 2009. Piksel Indonesia is the creator of Batik Fractal and jBatik Software. Through a yearlong research about batik and science, we then developed a modeling software application to create batik design generatively and presented the innovation in 10th Generative Art International Conference in Milan Italy. In 2008, this innovation funded by Business Innovation Fund SENADA USAID and created jBatik v.1 and focus to empower batik artisans in Bandung. Since that time, Piksel Indonesia is working to empower batik and craft artisans in all Indonesia especially in Java and Bali. Currently, we have trained around 1400 artisans to use jBatik software. The training was firstly organized by the local government in each rural area and villages where batik artisans usually live. As an innovation, the use of the software into traditional art needs intensive training and continued the effort. Through several training levels in mastering the use of jBatik software, the artisans can incorporate technology to develop their traditional craft work. The artisans are not only now have access to affordable technology and use the technology to develop their batik, but also have been proven to contribute to increase productivity, bring more sales and increase their profit which lead to improved income.
  • Innovation on learning and localization: Jaroka Mobile Based Tele-Healthcare – Pakistan, UM Healthcare Trust. We aim to devise newer and effective ways for bringing a rapid change in healthcare domain for rural communities. We have launched Jaroka to lower the cost of delivering care dramatically by leveraging ICT to deliver the scarcest resource, medical expertise, remotely. Jaroka Tele-Healthcare model utilizes internet and mobile platform to extend tele-healthcare services in rural Pakistan. This includes voice, Short Text Messaging (SMS),Multimedia Messaging (MMS),GPRS/Edge and VSAT to quickly and efficiently extend medical advice to Rural Health Workers (RHWs) in the field by connecting them to our network of specialists in cities and abroad. This model also includes Pakistan’s First Health Map through which the latest and live healthcare information is shared with relevant stakeholder across Pakistan to improve the healthcare in Pakistan.Through this project over 130,000 has been provided treated at hospitals and in fields.
  • Rights: I Change My City – India, Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy. Ichangemycity.com is a hyper-local social change network that has created communities of citizens in Bengaluru, keen on solving city centric problems and has resolved around 10,000 complaints by connecting them to various government agencies. The site has tried to help solve issues ranging from garbage collection, poor street lighting, potholes and security related issue in the suburbs. It has also provided citizens with useful information on how much funds have been allocated to wards and constituencies and how the same has been uitilised. The unique power of ichangemycity.com is that it networks people locally to address issues of common concerns. It connects people on-line to bring them together off-line for civic engagement on the ground. The multiplicity of various government departments and the paperwork involved acts as a deterrent for many individuals to connect with civic agencies. Ichangemycity.com tries to address this problem by being a seamless bridge between government and citizens. Ichangemycity.com works on the 4C mantra- Complaint, Community, Connect, and Content.