It’s been a good month! More media coverage, more solid Government partnerships, scaling Civic Compass, and kicking off hiring, and testimonials that energized us 🙂
Expanding our reach
Our first year at Zen Citizen was spent heads-down exploring different ways to make government services more accessible. Over the last couple of months, we’ve started giving more attention to outreach, and it’s beginning to show results.
This month the Times of India featured Zen Citizen, on Page 2 no less!
We were also invited to give a talk by the IIT Alumni Committee Bangalore (IITACB). They want to learn how we are addressing governance challenges creatively using hacks and lightweight tech tools.
Partnership with Bangalore Development Authority (BDA)
Zen Citizen has been afforded the privilege to witness firsthand, the citizen-facing operations of Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) under the leadership of the new Commissioner. It’s hard to remain cynical about the Govt. after seeing the commitment and follow-through with which they’re operating. It rivals that of top-tier companies.
We began the engagement with an audit of their eKhata process on the Seva Sindhu portal (having earlier covered the BBMP eKhata process). The audit identifies pain points across different stages of the application, the level of friction, and the resulting impact on user experience. It also points to actions we can take in the immediate term to minimize inconvenience for citizens, to “stem the bleed” as we call it.
Toward this end, we’re working with the team to develop workarounds for the identified pain points – to include in our guides and tools, while the BDA is able to prioritize fixing these issues on their end.
If we received this kind of encouragement and support from every department, running Zen Citizen would be much smoother!
Taking Civic Compass Beyond Bengaluru
Our vision is to scale Zen Citizen by expanding it to every department in every state, and potentially to other countries through open source, modular and easily extensible processes and code.
In line with this vision, our volunteers Priti Pandurangan and Abhik refactored the codebase for Civic Compass, the tool that allows Bengaluru residents to enter their address and instantly view all relevant offices, including GBA, BBMP, BDA, Revenue, BESCOM, BWSSB, and Police stations. The updated codebase makes Civic Compass easily extensible to other towns and cities, so more places can have essential, yet hard-to-find, civic information in one place!
The most challenging bit is getting accurate information for all the Government bodies (a “treasure hunt” as one of our readers expresses it), so we also provide a template to file an RTI application for this information.
Partnership with the Department of Stamps & Registration
This month, we worked closely with the Department of Stamps and Registration to produce a detailed guide on Digital e-Stamping – a fully online, paperless process that allows citizens to draft non-judicial documents (where registration is optional), pay stamp duty, and have parties and witnesses sign electronically, all within minutes. Karnataka is the third state to launch this service, following Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
The guide is undergoing a final round of fact-checks by the department before we publish it.
Hiring
This month marks a major milestone for us. With the support and encouragement of Dr. Malpani, we’ve begun hiring process for a Research Associate, to help scale our work. It feels bold, but with his backing, we’re moving forward with a little less trepidation.
Testimonials that energized us
I accidentally came upon this website when my marriage application was rejecting since the marriage photo size didn’t match the required size.
The photo size (B2) which seems strange as this is the first time in my life I heard about this size, the file size and file type combination requirement is definitely aimed at ensuring that most applications are rejected and the citizens show up at the subregistrar to cough up the “required fees” to fix the files and expedite the process.
Trust me, I have worked in IT for 2 decades and it was taking me multiple tries and stumping me to use online tools to meet the criteria of the file size, file type and photo size combination that is demanded by the portal.
I would have continued to battle another hour had I not stumbled on this portal which made formating the photo file a breeze! I am baffled on how non technical citizens would be able to meet this photo upload criteria at all.
Zencitizen has to demand the govt to make it easier to submit photos of various formats and sizes OR provide a tool like the one on this portal so citizens don’t give up in frustration and are forced to bribe to get the certification.
Whatsapp Message from a reader in the header image 🙂