Category: Volunteering
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Build Civic Compass for Your City: Our New Extensible Version Is Live
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…
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Call for Volunteers: Help Build a Chat Assistant for Navigating Government Sites
Who we are Zen Citizen is a grassroots, volunteer-based, open‑source initiative that demystifies everyday government procedures in India like getting a driving license, marriage registration, property registrations. We aim to rein in petty corruption by empowering citizens to navigate the system with confidence and to challenge bribe demands instead of submitting to them silently. We…
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Making Remote Volunteer Teams Work Across Time Zones – Lessons from Civic Compass
What is Civic Compass Like every Zen project, Civic Compass provides essential, crucial, yet hard-to-find information. In this case, tool where you could just enter an address in Bengaluru and instantly see the BBMP, BDA, Revenue, BESCOM, BWSSB offices, and Police stations, for that location. All in one place. How it started: A “lazy question”…
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Volunteering at Zen Citizen: Our Guiding Principles
Candor matters; Commitments shift, Just keep us posted; Assume good intent; We’ll check in, but contributions must be self-driven Zen Citizen is a 100% volunteer-driven initiative. Most of our core volunteers are from r/bangalore on Reddit, where we first shared the idea for feedback. We consider ‘core’ volunteers to have made solid contributions and shown…