Sreechand Tavva

Sreechand Tavva

Manager - Technology in Bangalore, He/Him

Leads knowledge and data products at Arghyam and India Water Portal.

Building for the next billion. Interested in climate action, accesibility, learning and inclusion.

Work Experience

2023 — Now
Manager, Technology at Arghyam
Bangalore

DPI for water, leading efforts to create a DPI for the water sector in India

Working with Ministry of Jal Shakti, modifying existing products to create a DPI for water.

Enabling State Departments to create standards and build APIs for Water DPI.

Building a community of NGOs to validate DPG prototypes in pilot districts

2016 — Now

Managed a SaaS based learning management system with 20k+ community users.

Managed tech-support team that deployed and handled L1 and L2 support across 9+ Indian states.

Enabled 1500+ trainers to adopt to our platform by creating and sharing best practices.

Reduced onboarding time from 10 to 2 days by templating process for new partners.

Managed multiple data and technology products

Spearheaded implementation of Open-source Learning Management System.

Mentored water experts to recreate courses from slides to reusable learning modules.

Established field data collection tools for community workers to monitor groundwater levels.

2022 — 2023

Leading development and editorial teams to maintain multiple media sites and knowledge platforms for India Water Portal, a dedicated knowledge portal on water.

Led editorial and content strategy, created the most listened podcast on water in India - Voices for Water.

Scaled site architecture to support audience growth from 200k to 1.6 million per month.

Reduced AWS server expenses by consolidating services, optimizing servers, and planning reserved instances leading to annual savings of 40%.

Adopted Agile by working with multiple teams to bring predictability to feature releases.

2014 — 2015

Researched pricing feasibility and market feasibility for new services and products.

Trained rural field agents to conduct product demos and installations of new products.

2011 — 2012

Developed client acquisition and developer engagement pipelines.

On-field product research and demo of software to prospective clients.

Created developer community events and outreach practices that improved hiring

2010 — 2011

Created web modules for microfinance workflows between field agents and loan officers.

Built a custom module for content providers to develop and deploy learning content.

Designed interfaces for first-time technology users with low-end smartphones.

Reduced survey duration from 4 hours to 45 minutes with form automations.

Optimized monitoring and validation of field data for loan officers.

Projects

2021
Scaling Community Engagement at Foundation for Ecological Society
2019

Helped pivot Arghyam from a traditional philanthropy to an ecosystem enabler. Inspired by the Digital Public Goods Alliance.

I led a multi stakeholder team in developing and deploying a learning management system with a focus on openness and sharing.

Trainers were able to create modules easily, translate modules easily and partners were able to build courses from all available content, not just their own.

Codebase of new modules created were contributed to the ecosystem. All content created on the platform was Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0)

2018

As I started managing India Water Portal, I realized that most nonprofits who are poised to use GIS tools do not have an understanding on availability of datasets on groundwater and related resources(Land Use/Land Cover, Precipitation).

Commissioned this grant to analyze available datasets and to build a prototype that can overlay selected datasets.

2017
Kobo for Water at Multiple Indian Nonprofits

Built workflows to collect data for groundwater monitoring, trained NGOs across India

Having used ODK in the previous projects and understanding its limitations (lack of case management, ease of use, and update lags) I evaluated other open and SaaS data collection platforms

I rolled out KoboCollect with templates for groundwater data that nonprofit partners can quickly duplicate and collect data about their groundwater resources.

Trained NGOs in Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura on how to collect data, data standards and interpreting collected data.

These rollouts led to National Mission on Himalayan Studies
(NMHS) implementing tools and standards in Uttarakhand, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh

2016

Customized ODK to build an inventory of springs in 3 districts of Odisha.

Consulted water experts and local data collecting volunteers to create standards

Trained 50 people over 2 days to collect data of 300 springs in 2 months.

Collated and visualized this data that led to the creation of the 1000 Springs Initiative by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs

2017
Data Challenges in the Development Sector at Open Data Camp
Delhi

Shared culture and technological challenges that organisations must overcome to lead data-driven interventions in the development sector.

2010
Designing Culturally Appropriate Games by Drawing on Indian Mythology at IndiaHCI 2010 | IDID 2010
Mumbai

As part of IFIP TC13 Special Interest Group on Interaction Design for International Development, presented on language learning games to compliment school education for rural Indian students.

Side Projects

Ongoing

ReRoll is a community-focused board games collective in Bangalore. What started as a way for a few friends to share our joy of boardgaming grew to become the largest board game group in India.

2021
Coping with COVID at Pause to Begin

Collaborated with therapists to set up pro-bono therapy sessions during 1st and 2nd waves of COVID. I onboarded therapists onto a scheduling platform, trained them on how to use and customize their slots based on their availability.

Writing

Volunteering

2023 — 2023
Chiang Mai, Thailand

Was part of a 5-day institute by IT for Change to capacitate civil society actors with the necessary vocabulary and tools to appropriately frame and approach emerging digital intersections with their work, as well as develop strategies for effective political organization.

2022 — 2022

As part of the TICTeC Labs programme, mySociety convened TICTeC Action Lab (aka working group) to discuss common challenges in using civic tech to encourage people to change and coordinate their behaviour in ways that can cause significant changes in society, specifically through the lens of climate action.

2022 — 2022
Contributor at National Data Platform

As part of the consultations for upcoming National Data Platform, I gave inputs on the proposed technical architecture. I shared nonprofits challenges in contributing and accessing open data.

2018 — 2018
Member at Karnataka Jnana Aayoga (Karnataka Knowledge Commision)
Vikasa Soudha

Advised Data Management Sub Group for Karnataka State Water Policy on data gaps in public data, need for community owned data governance and management.

2017 — 2017
Mentor at NCore Hackathon

Mentored teams working on solutions for water security, by sharing data, limitations of current alternatives.

2013 — 2017

Hosted the first Bangalore Open Data Camp, an unconference with participation from NGOs, data scientists, technology firms and social impact business.

Also ran workshops to liberate data, and manage the community.

2010 — 2015
Bangalore

Love the community, volunteered in different roles over the years - logistics, video streaming, network setup, speaker support and the likes.

Learnt from talks, interacted with experts, was an overall ball to be a part of.

Education

2014 — 2016
M.A at Azim Premji University
Bangalore

Development Studies with a specialization in Sustainability

2006 — 2010
B.Tech at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University
Kakinada

Computer Science and Engineering

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