It’s been a year since we started Zen Citizen to make government processes more accessible for everyone. Our vision is to scale Zen Citizen across departments in every state, and perhaps to other countries as well. We plan to do this by working in the open – sharing our ways of working and building in public, and making the code not just open source but easy to adapt to other departments in a plug-and-play way.
We are starting with Civic Compass, a tool where you enter an address in Bengaluru and get the GBA, BBMP, BDA, Revenue, Stamps & Registration, BESCOM, BWSSB offices, Police stations (Law & Order, Traffic, CEN – Cyber Crime, Economic Offences, Narcotics) for that location. Essential, crucial, surprisingly hard to find information. All in one place.
Civic Compass was first launched in Dec 2024, and the code has been open source since day one. What’s new now is that the code is modular, so it can be managed in smaller parts and expanded with new features as we grow, and extensible, making it easy to use as a template for other departments and cities. The most challenging part of building Civic Compass is getting accurate information from all the relevant government bodies. To make it easier to extend Civic Compass to other cities, we also provide a detailed guide and template and gather this information.
We hope you’ll give Civic Compass a spin and build one for your own city! If you’d like to volunteer, please fill out this volunteer intake form. And feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Here’s a generous piece of feedback from reader Vishwanath Selvakumar from Whitefield.
Media Coverage for Civic Compass
