This was the Online Complaint Management System (OCMS) which was a centralized complaint management system that allowed citizens to lodge their complaints through phone, fax, personal letters, visits, etc. and all of these were entered into a centralized complaints system, despatched to relevant officers/departments responsible for resolving them. This, in turn, helped to better civic services. The team Bawa was working with was thinking of the online space as the space of democracy, citizenship and negotiation. It turns out that this is not as straightforward as it was imagined to be. There are so many stakeholders – citizens who hate their neighbour, politicians in need for attention, administrators not doing anything effectively and more - trying to use the online space to make their own claim, negotiate in their own way and to escalate a conflict and so. Among other things, this shows that the relation between land and space and the online world, between the real and the virtual, is not dichotomous, argues Bawa. It all flows into each other.
Real and virtual flows
In another project Bawa was involved in, the government wanted to offer civic services through an online system.
