Civic Technology

Enabling better urban governance using tools to solve civic problems

Overview

The quality of life in a city is often related to the quality of infrastructure and services – often a complex system that has many elements in play. It takes numerous civic agencies to make a city function the right way.

Technology has the potential to fill the gap in this system and make each independent function perform better as part of a whole. Such a software platform is what we call Civic Technology.

Objectives

Civic Technology has its focus on the citizen. It enables the citizen to express genuine concerns directly to top ranking government officials.

Civic technology brings transparency to governance with easy access to government data. It also empowers citizens to engage with civic matters on a scale that was never before possible.

Present challenges

All of a city's governance functions have their own way of operating and even viewing the city. Defining a civic technology solution for this complex system is always a challenge.

It must accommodate every department’s perspective, working models, citizens’ inputs relevant to their neighbourhood, and tools to solve these by providing the right inputs. They should offer the right way to interact and call relevant people for the assistance they require.

IChangeMyCity

Janaagraha, through its pioneering citizen engagement and open data platform, IChangeMyCity, has been working to bridge the gap between citizens and governments. Launched in 2013, IChangeMyCity provides an easy way for citizens to report civic issues in their neighbourhood and track the quality of life around them.

Swachhata App

The IChangeMyCity technology framework paved the way for the creation of the Swachhata App, which promotes widespread citizen participation and civic engagement in realizing the objective of Clean India.

BLCares

The blcares.in platform made for BBMP was able to set up Ward Decentralised Triage and Emergency Response Committees (Ward DETER Committees). These helped address COVID-19 issues at a ward level. Today blcares.in helps citizens in connecting with their ward nodal offices as well as in finding out their ward’s details.

IPaidABribe

The IPaidABribe platform tries to tackle corruption by crowdsourcing citizen experiences. The app encourages participants to self report whenever they have paid a bribe.