Twitter And Safecity Collaborate to Provide A Public-Harassment Free India #SafecityIndia

Help make your city safer through @SafecityIndia. Here’s your chance to speak up about public harassment: https://t.co/BTqnLLYejr — Twitter India (@TwitterIndia) October 27, 2015

Twitter has become the best means to crowdsource stories related to public harassment as has been confirmed by Safecity India. As is evident, it enables more effective measures by local authorities that are engaged in the protection of women. Twitter has provided a platform for its users to reach out to related administrative agencies in times of crises and expecting a quicker and realiable action. Twitter enables to approach faster by giving real time reports about the criticality. The tweet not only reaches to the concerned agencies but also to all those who are active on twitter and seek any information about relevant keywords.

@RichaHingorani, thanks for reporting. If urgent please call police helpline 1091 or 100. pic.twitter.com/V5oAyG4jAm — Safecity (@SafecityIndia) October 27, 2015

To further harness the power of Twitter for social safety and timely & effective activism, Safecity India is in process of integration of Twitter's platform for real time public conversations so as to empower people anywhere in India to share their relevant personal stories regarding public harassment. The campaign has commenced today and is currently aiding women in Mumbai, Goa and Delhi. The aid, is backed by police support in these three cities. Ultimately the same has to spread all across India. The process is simple to raise an alert in case of any contingency. For any kind of harassment in public places in any of these three cities, one has to tweet to @SafecityIndia or can use the hashtag #SafecityIndia along with the incident brief. In case you want to share it privately, you can use Direct Message feature. Since this is possible only if the receiver is following you, it is important to send a message to @SafecityIndia stating request for following so that DM can be sent. There is an auto response feature that you get immediately from the Safecity team for confirmation.

.@SafeCity exposes India’s #sexualharassment hotspots https://t.co/LOGkCeT93R #womeintech — Shelli Trung (@ShelliTrung) September 23, 2015

The auto message that you receive also contains the emergency numbers for immediate help. This is a great initiative and definitely the effective usage can bring in a big change in the country. It will be important to know the actual response from Safecity team and police in case of an incident seeking immediate attention. Otherwise it will go into a coldbox labelled as a good app but lacking acutal effectivity. More organizations and individuals should volunteer for this cause so as to keep it live and result delivering. There are more effective development plans by the Safecity team in near future. Some of these features will be indicating real time map locations, incident prone areas, location wise incidents, and probably the turn around time for incidents reported.

Elsa from Safecity.in talks on how to make crowd sourced data useful @UChicagoCi3 @safecity.in pic.twitter.com/OA03kVg81D — UChicago Delhi (@UChiDelhi) September 2, 2015

So far, more than 6,000 stories have been shared by women residing in 50 cities in India, Nepal and Kenya. The more the momentum and public involvement, the more effective and result oriented this drive will be. Twitter has become a solid platform to collaborate general public, NGOs, government agencies and data scientists all concerned with this particual cause. To learn more about Twitter's safety tools, policies and initiatives you can visit Twitter Safety Center.