This month began with a sense of powerlessness, but ended feeling grounded, with strength restored. 

There has been no movement on partnering with the government, even after the Revenue Minister personally endorsed us to his deputies. The enormity of what we’re trying to do has begun to sink in. Building a parallel movement is meaningful but painfully slow. Our volunteers’ hard work could have far greater impact if the government adopted our content or code – and we expect no attribution.

On top of that is the pressure of being the one holding everything together, even though we’ve been fortunate to have a few dedicated volunteers who’ve fully owned their areas.

A couple of timely developments helped defuse the weight. A new volunteer (Thank you, Arijit) stepped up to take initiative on the tech side, and we also saw a wave of strong volunteer applications – thanks to a Reddit post where we explained what we’re building, using a viral stand-up clip by Biswa that highlights the exact same issues with government websites that we’re solving!

Key updates this month:

1. We’re working to make the Civic Compass codebase standard, modular, and extensible; modular so it can be easily broken down and maintained, and extensible so it can grow and adapt with new features. This aligns with our broader vision to scale Zen Citizen across departments in every state.

2. The WhatsApp bot is going through multiple iterations. So far, we’ve been comfortable releasing even rough prototypes, since the tools delivered value despite minimal UX polish. But we’re taking a more measured approach with the WhatsApp bot. Its utility lies in the conversation design, and it needs to deliver the kind of natural, guided experience we want users to have.

3. We’re providing close guidance and inputs to support a study by the University of California, San Diego, which uses social listening tools to analyze issues in government service delivery and explore low-effort, practical ways to address them.

4. We’ve made several changes to improve the usability of existing tools, including promptly adding GBA corporation data to Civic Compass as soon as the corporation was created and announced – thanks to our volunteer Abhik!

Onward & Upward! 

_{Feature image is from our Reddit post, adjusted to meet size requirements.}