**Context**

Arghyam works with communities that have challenges in accessing safe water from sustainable sources. They either have access to water for a few months a year or they have perennial access to water which is not safe for drinking or domestic use. The NGOs we work with conduct interventions to sensitize communities on

* understanding groundwater

* equipping them to improve their groundwater resources and

* track their resources to ensure sustainability.

The current model is not scalable as the rate at which groundwater depletion is happening in India exponentially surpasses collective efforts of governments, NGOs and CSR initiatives.

### **The Idea**

I’ve noticed that NCERT has incorporated QR codes in their textbooks(Energized Textbooks). These textbooks came with QR codes in each chapter that were linked to videos, experiments and additional problems that improved learning outcomes for students. I’ve also noticed that users are more likely to interact with QR codes on a poster vs when a phone number or a website is provided.

I knew posters can help with sensitization but they lacked the interactive nature in them. The idea was to test if posters can be created that allows NGOs to share content with communities and allow communities to reach out to NGOs.

**The Problem I was trying to solve**

NGOs working on sensitizing communities lack the resources to scale their outreach to sensitize communities dealing with groundwater problems. They use their resources to deliver training in communities that are sensitized or have an active water program. Even though there are a lot more communities that can benefit from this training, NGOs are only able to do training and deliver sensitisation material if they're physically present in these villages. Communities cannot access this material unless they attend a program.

**What made me think of this product**

As a manager at Arghyam, I worked on a few initiatives that enabled NGO partners to start using technology platforms to deliver training online. Their usage increased due to COVID lockdowns limiting their ability to do training in-person. This was a pivotal change as previously skeptical NGOs were now open to piloting newer solutions to their problems.

**What is the product purpose?**

Enable communities to interact with behaviour change material that NGOs disseminate.

**Organizational Objective**

Help NGOs understand the type of water problems that communities are facing without needing to conduct door-to-door surveys.

**Product's features or functionalities**

* Ability to create posters with customizable QR codes that allow NGOs to share relevant videos and instructions.

* Ability for NGOs to find out which training topics were most accessed based on usage tracking data.

* Ability for communications teams to change content linked to a QR code without needing to physically access the poster.

* Ability for communities to get on demand access to updated information on groundwater issues.

**Who are the target stakeholders of the solution?**

* NGOs training communities on groundwater that lack resources to increase their impact.

**Demographics of users**

* Community members

  * in villages with groundwater problems

  * are part of village water committees (address these problems)

  * are comfortable with a smartphone

  * have access to internet.

### **Market Research**

Critical components for this solution are QR code solutions that can

* capture GPS coordinates and

* can tag it to village, district and state boundaries.

I couldn't find any solution that offered both these components at an acceptable accuracy. Most solutions did not capture location but allowed editing the destination URL of the QR code. The rest allowed editing but were priced per QR code making it prohibitive for our stakeholders.

Another challenge was in tagging GPS locations to village, district and state boundaries. Most reverse geo-coding APIs offered by GIS platforms were aimed at providing highly accurate information for cities. They fell short of providing accurate information at village level. They either had stale data (outdated village names, lack of new village boundaries) or served only the closest city/town names through reverse geocoding APIs.

### **Metrics**

The metrics for this project were number of QR code scans by community members and number of posters being deployed. The former gave us usage and the latter adoption.

Usage

* Number of scans for each QR code in a poster

* Number of downloads of content after scanning a QR code

Adoption

* Number of posters deployed monthly

* Number of times NGOs accessed dashboards

* Number of times content on QR codes was edited

### **Prototyping and Design**

I validated this idea at two levels. First was with a mockup to get buy-in from management and the second was with an MVP to get NGOs that wanted to pilot this solution and shape the product.

**Building a prototype**

I built the prototype using Rebrandly (URL shortening service) and simple static QR code generator. Rebrandly allows edits to the source and the destination URL. I created a poster with content from an existing material. I added a few QR codes that were pointed to videos. I scanned the QR code along with using a GPS spoofing app to increase scans for different QR codes in two different villages. I exported this data, and used Google Maps reverse geocoding API to capture the village of each scan. I plotted this in a custom google map and added it to the table of scans and location for scans.

**Building the MVP**

Building the MVP needed a few more hands on deck. Having got approval to test MVP, I got an NGO partner to design a poster and share material that they wanted to embed. Using the QR code solution by [Beaconstac](https://www.beaconstac.com/) I embedded them with QR codes pointing to videos, PDFs and forms. I shared this poster with my team and instructed them to scan them while at the office and on their field trips. With the reverse geocoding API I got village names for each scan and put them in tables along with a map of the scans. I demoed this to a few NGOs and got two of them to pilot the product.

### **Product Architecture**

* Notion for the content team to create public pages

* Google Drive to upload files and videos.

* [QRD.by](https://qrd.by/) for generating QR codes and capturing GPS coordinates

* A DigitalOcean server hosting the db and scripts to call reverse geocoding APIs by MapMyIndia (replaced with a GIS server from [FES](https://www.fes.org.in/))

* Google Data Studio Dashboard with 6 charts

**\
Future Plans, product enhancements**

* Two NGOs are using this product. Future plans involve scaling marketing and onboarding more NGOs to make the product self-sustainable.

* Current dashboards are not customizable by an NGO. Plans in the pipeline are to use a BI tool that allows customization.

### **Challenges**

* Reverse geocoding GPS coordinates from QR codes uncovered that village names were highly inaccurate. I compared MapMyIndia, Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps and settled on MapMyIndia.

* The person sending the posters with QR codes is different from the ones editing content on it. A prior version relied on the poster creator and content editor being the same person. It relied on the poster creator generating unique QR codes for each poster.

* The first version of the product used APIs from MapMyIndia. After building it using a developer API key, and requesting for a production API key, they came back with a restriction that the agreement does not allow caching of the reverse geocoding API results. One of the two NGO partners had a GIS server with reverse geocoding API, their results met our accuracy needs, we switched to their APIs.

Scaling Community Engagement

Manager - Technology

Data, data everywhere, but where?

Spreading awareness on COVID-19

Community Qure

Development Studies with a specialization in Sustainability

https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/sj7rPN4l0GM53uxlyYxcIO/Roll-the-dice-to-break-the-ice.html

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.

Open Water Data

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

Kobo for Water

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

Odisha Springs

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)

Learning Platforms

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.

Boardgame community

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.

Coping with COVID

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.

Designing Culturally Appropriate Games by Drawing on Indian Mythology

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

Data Challenges in the Development Sector

A Commons Approach to Digital Transformation

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.

Volunteer

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

Mentor

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.

Frontiers and Frames for a new Digitality

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.

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.

Working Group Member

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.

Contributor

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

Member

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

Evangelist

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

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

Product Associate

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.

Technology Manager

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

Manager, Technology

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.

Engineer

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.

Sreechand Tavva

2022