Yesterday, 25th of November 2014, ten civil society organizations that consist of Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), Indonesia Parliamentary Center (IPC), Jaringan Pendidikan Pemilih untuk Rakyat (JPPR), Migrant Care, Perkumpulan untuk Pemilu dan Demokrasi (Perludem), Perhimpunan Pengembangan Media Nusantara (PPMN), Puskapol UI, Public Virtue Institut, Solidaritas Perempuan dan Yappika, which are supported by The Asia Foundation (TAF), have formed a joint committee to organize a national conference with the theme “Masyarakat Sipil dan Penguatan Demokrasi Pascapemilu 2014” (Civil Society and Post-2014-election Democracy Reinforcement). One focus of discussion in this activity is the issue of general election law enforcement. The program is being held in the JS Luwansa Hotel, Central Jakarta.
There are several violations that usually occur when the general election takes place. It is caused by many factors, specifically:
- Some parts of the regulations are ambiguous and open to multiple interpretation.
- Badan Pengawasan Pemilu (Bawaslu), the Election Supervisory Body, does not have a mechanism to provide relevant information to the informer related to the handling of violations.
- The general election regulation in Indonesia does not have strict sanctions against the violators, whereas this is needed to ensure the election is fair.
Therefore, the purposes of this discussion are:
- Finding the problems of law enforcement, in particular on the 2014 general election.
- Arranging paces that can be undertaken by civil society to resolve the issue of law enforcement.
- Determine steps that can be undertaken by civil society to maintain a democratic constitutional state, associated with the accomplishment of general election.
With this event, it is expected that future general election will go well with fewer obstacles and fraud.
WGS was invited to the national conference to present the survey app that we built. We proudly helped TAF, a nonprofit international development organization, develop a website to show the result of election survey and other data related to election survey. Visitors can see and sort the survey based on categories, questions and many more. Clicking on a region on the map will group the result of survey from that region or province. This is doable thanks to GeoJSON. The survey results on the landing page can be shown in a different chart: in a pie chart, column chart, bar chart, and graph chart – it depends on the input in the admin panel.
The code, as requested by TAF, is open source, so that other developer communities, can build similar survey apps. The current codebase already allows users to upload data adjusted to their maps and questions, and multi-tenant capabilities.
The technical challenge in this project is in the uploading process. The input is a large XLSX file for every survey with multiple sheets, thus the uploading process, albeit in running in the background, needs a great amount of memory. Therefore, we use MongodDB to function as the storage for the filtered Excel data. Then we use MongoDB cursor to fetch the data and parse it into the MySQL tables. That way we won’t need to use large portion of memory to temporary store the filtered Excel data.