Editors' Blog

On 31 January 2009, nine months after Oorvani Media launched citizenmatters.in, Bangalore’s first online community e-newsmagazine, we are committing the Citizen Matters print fortnightly magazine to you.This free, sleek, 16-page magazine is being launched in the south Bangalore localities of JP Nagar and BTM Layout II Stage.  We encourage you to send us your responses and feedback as we grow to cover other areas of the city. What is Citizen Matters and who are we? Citizen Matters is local-news-only product, with high quality reporting and commentary. It is published by Oorvani Media, a local media firm founded by Bangaloreans, Subramaniam…

Now that people have sorted out voter roll/EPIC card issues (or given up on the same), the next thing to attend to is the candidates themselves. Campaigns are on full swing; But with the election commission laying down strict guidelines for the candidates, citizens are not inflicted with the usual din. However we still need to do the due diligence on who the candidate are in our constituency, whom do we vote for and on what basis? This is the information I found in the online space. From the EC's website: Election commission site (http://search.eci.gov.in/ae%5f2008e) provides info on- Party wise…

Barcamp [Apr 19 - 20]I had gone to the Bommanahalli CMC today to help somebody submit Form 6. The BBMP control room lady was busy. Her colleague responded to my first question. When I asked for a clarification, he snapped, ‘I have lots of work, elections are coming up‘. Well, elections are the reason we were there too. Agreed it is our duty as citizens to ensure we get on the voter rolls. It looks like sometimes, we have to go through some agni pariksha for this! How many people can afford to take off from their work for hours…

It was a quiet Saturday afternoon on the first of March this year that Citizen Matters, Bangalore's first online community news publication went live for the city public. The two of us at Oorvani Media, and Gokul Janga at Tecdost, our technology friends, had had a frantic week. March 1st was our final deadline, and we were not going to miss this. Working furiously at our keyboards, it was around 5.30 p.m, that we had addressed the last of the publishing wrinkles that were fighting for our attention, and gave the finishing touches for the launch version of www.citizenmatters.in. We…