TL;DR 

Last month, we announced a shift in focus from building content and tools to actively driving reach and user adoption. We pursued this through: 

• Government Engagement: Despite being draining, the experiences this month offer compelling reasons for optimism.
• Media Outreach: Our “just show up” approach at news offices worked!

Adding to our progress, our WhatsApp chatbot has transitioned from prototype to closed beta.

Government Engagement

When Fixing Became Draining 

We met a senior bureaucrat and demoed our content and tools like Village Finder, Civic Compass, and Spashta, our Chatbot with an in-built Image Resizer customized for the Karnataka Government’s portal. They were incredulous that such well-thought-out, polished tools were built entirely through pro bono efforts, and immediately introduced us to the third-party team responsible for the website.

When we explained that even simple text changes-without any UI or backend tweaks, could significantly improve the user experience, we were asked to prove the bugs existed and that instructions to users were unclear or missing. 

Since we are dealing with the team directly responsible for the website, some resistance is natural. Still, we left the meeting more depleted and exhausted than at any point in the past year of building Zen Citizen. The demands of running a volunteer-driven initiative or unearthing obscure process details – essentially building a parallel system – are sometimes overwhelming, but they never came close to breaking the spirit, like this attempt to directly ‘fix the problem’ did.

The tools we build are all open-source and I shared the links to the code, there’s been no response so far. 

A door opened, but we’re still waiting to be let through 🙂  

We were able to reach the Revenue Minister of Karnataka over email, and he responded positively, writing a note to his team to ‘strongly recommend’ they work with us to ‘bridge the last mile gap’ and ‘improve user access and interfacing’. There has not been any movement in the two weeks since; even with his endorsement, this journey clearly won’t come easy – it’ll take persistence and tenacity to keep things moving.

Beyond Exhaustion, Doubling Down

Creating a parallel system is valuable , as our testimonials show. We received a strange compliment on Reddit a couple of days ago – a reader called our work “God’s work”! – screenshot attached.

However, to scale swiftly, we need to engage directly with the government. How could I do that while still protecting my energy? We need a champion within the system.

We reached out to a bureaucrat who had encouraged us previously and now holds a new role in the Bangalore Development Authority. They’ve graciously agreed to partner with us. Our next steps involve defining the scope of this effort and bringing on volunteers to lead key areas like UX, tech, and content.

Media Outreach

We simply showed up at the offices of The Hindu and The Indian Express late in the afternoon, catching reporters back at their desks. The Hindu was particularly interested, and we’re expecting coverage shortly 🙂

Content, Tools & Collaborations

Adding to our progress, our Whatsapp conversational interface is in closed beta now. We’d love for you to try it out, so please get in touch, particularly if you need an Encumbrance Certificate in Karnataka! We’re feeling nervous anticipation about its reception.

On the academic collaboration front, in addition to UCSD and the Centre for the Study of Corruption at Sussex as I shared last month, we were also fortunate to receive a positive response from Stanford University. They met with us, and we’re exploring ways to collaborate. More on that soon 🙂