Empower

Elevator Pitch #

We want to empower citizens by giving them the ability to provide constructive feedback when they interact with Government officials or officials representing a public-serving organization.

The How? #

We use the information (profile and organizational information) provided by the Govt. of India, or the organization (from their respective websites) to construct public profiles of officials that citizens can provide feedback to. This has the potential to amplify good actors; as well as provide the ability for citizens to discover who an official’s superior is and provide constructive feedback and a means to escalate. At the same time, it gives Govt. organizations power to collect detailed analytics on how effective they are.

Show me #

Here is some context on the idea. This is the slide deck that we presented.
Here is a demo video of the Android application we built.

Demo Video explanation #

The demo video walks through the flow where the user signs in with a phone number. This is so we can do spam and abuse detection. So people cannot submit fake feedback.

Anybody with a phone number can sign in.
Once the user signs in, he can search for an official that he interacted with. The search box also uses the current location to help with search (to narrow things down). Once the user finds the official he wants to provide feedback to - feedback is one click away.

The feedback collected can be customized based on the organization’s requirement (i.e. the application can collect things like when the interaction occurred, how much time did it take to attend to the problem etc.) The user can also look at the officials supervisor as well the organizational chart for escalating things, if he chose to do so.

Analytics #

The app collects analytics in realtime, and we can slice and dice that data in may ways (depending on the organizational requirement). This will help keep track of organizational health.

F.A.Q #

• Does this only work on Android ?
  
  No, this app has been currently written for Android, but can very easily be provided as a web-app hence making it cross platform.

• What information does the organization have to provide to integrate with this app?
  
  The minimal details are Officials name, Photo, Contact, Designation, who he/she reports to

• Can we add more fields / customize fields for feedback ?
  
  Yes, we can collect any data that the organization might think are relevant when asking for feedback. All this data can be fed back into analytics.

Epilogue #

This project was proposed and built as part of a hackathon, organized by IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation to help with the Digital India Initiative. We are a team of 4 Googlers, and we built the Android application and the back-end APIs (application programming interfaces) from scratch in 22 hours. This project won 2nd prize at the Hackathon. This project was greatly appreciated for having the ability to make a real difference.

This project is also equally applicable for large service oriented organizations like cellular/internet service providers, power distribution, retail etc., and every other industry which would like to get an understanding of the customers pain points, and would like feedback on new initiatives.