Harnessing the power of people network and community with tech
It has been almost an year since I have written something on medium. Writing this article to share the power and impact created when community and networks able to access and leverage technology.
The pandamic has changed lot of things even the way we spend our liesure time. Those phase of going out with friends and family is now treated as a phase of extreme caution.
However, there are some postivies that this pandamic given to us. Apart from being able to be in home and avoiding formal dresses this pandamic has shown the importance of being there for each other as a community.
Technology has played a very critical role in enabling the new normal during pandamic which ensures we are not losing out anything rather do things differently. Tech also connected people and helped communities to support each other and to contribute in the fight against covid.
I am super grateful to be given one such opportunity by being a part of Reap Benefit tech efforts in enabling young people and communities to build their civic muscle by solving local problems.
Reap Benefit we are very clear that what we develop should be in service of citizens and the communities helping them to solve local neighborhood issues which inturn increase the citizen participate at local level — which is the most important element to achieve citizen driven democracy.
Being a not-for-profit and a social impact organisation with whatever limited resources we have built/building the following three tools.
- Solve Ninja Chatbot — whatsApp powered chatbot
- City dashboard — city level dashboard for citizens to know about civic issues that are closeby
- Solve Ninja Forum — a citizen crowd sourced repo of citizen actions
Impact stories:
- Citizen to citizen enablement
In Karnataka, with the help of bangalore apartment foundation and using the chatbot we were able to help domestic workers avail the scheme that was launced by the government as a part of covid relief.
2. Citizen disaster moblisation
During the recent chennai rains, we helped the citizens and communities to mark the places of water clogging. The data is made public and active citizens are using it as a source to avoid the problem in future.
3. Crowdsourcing of citizen solutions
The network of communities has been enabled through the crowdsourcing of solution to man and animal conflict problem faced by farmers. This was facilitated through the chatbot
4. Connecting Community and the government
Through collaborations we have provided the citizens to raise their issues using technology and it gets noticied by the respectice authorities.
5. Empowering covid ninjas
During the 2nd wave of covid, we empowered citizens and communities to act as covid ninjas. The covid ninjas has taken several initiatives depending up on the problem they identified at a hyperlocal level. This was facilitated by city dashboard and chatbot.
I can go on writing about other scenarios where communities and citizens were nudged to take action and empowered to collaborate and execute.
Would want to thank everyone Reap Benefit for all their effort without them this wouldn’t have had hit the ground.
A huge shout out to our partners and collaborators. Finally, grateful to those citizens and their communities who continously flex their civic muscle and provide meaning to these tech interventions.
I look forward for the next year 2022 to be more impactful by having enabled communities that are tech empowered across each and every corner of our city.
If you are willing to join hands in our journey be it a individual volunteer contributor or an org looking to collaborate in creating generation of well informed citizen champs.
You can write to gauthamraje@reapbenefit.org
