[PLUG] FLOSS on Election Commission Website

[Vijay Patil]

For those interested in FLOSS applications/initiatives in government.:

I was looking for some information about voter registration. Found a
interesting page about FLOSS on Election Commission website.

http://www.eci.gov.in/DevForum/DevForum.asp

----------------------------------------------------------------
Indic Languages

Major portion of R&D has gone into movement from ISCII/ISFOC into
Unicode for various Indian languages, and enabling them on the net.
Wikipedia has an excellent page on Indic Languages. To see sample
usage, follow various subsections on this page, as well as Search
Electoral Rolls section, and Genesys Archives.
----------------------------------------------------------------
FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software)

We encourage use of Free/Open Source solutions. Though at ECI and
State level, databases are consolidated in Oracle, we encourage
smaller databases at the levels of ERO/DEO to be in MySQL, Postgres
etc. We are big supporters of OpenOffice.Org. Election Machinery
across the country is also encouraged to use freeware like IrfanView
for Imaging, GRASS, MapServer, Google Maps API etc. for GIS etc. Our
databases are mostly XMLised now, and in this section also, we have
released most of the databases in XML format rather than any
proprietary format.


----------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
Vijay Patil