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Build for Bharat Fellowship: Pull-Requesting Change in Government

Approved
Session Description

  • Most of us, technologists or designers, don't think we can actually get a chance to improve public technologies that impact millions of Indians.

  • Where to even begin? Beyond the 5-6 celebrated public technologies in the urban fold, most public technologies remain invisible to most of us unless our daily lives depend on them.

  • Thinking of sarkari as a seemingly closed source system, with complex and critical codebase, unreachable maintainers and absent readme files.

  • How do we change it?

  • The Build for Bharat fellowship fills this gap by identifying, equipping and placing public technologists into government departments over the summer.

  • In FOSS parallel, we provide public spirited technologists and designers with a good first-issue and necessary tacit knowledge to make their first pull-request to important public technologies.

  • Ethos behind the fellowship - why start something?

  • The projects undertaken by the 19 fellows in the first cohort across 6 government departments.

  • What tensions, inflow of values and FOSS which the fellows bought into the departments.

  • The youth are alright.

Key Takeaways

  • How do public spirited people push commits to sys-sarkar?

  • How to work with the government in tech and design?

  • Why Build for Bharat fellowship?

  • Projects from the first cohort of the Build for Bharat Fellowship and learnings

References

https://bharatdigital.io/fellowship
Which track are you applying for?
Main track

Speakers

Harsh Nisar
Founder | Bharat Digital

Harsh has over a decade of experience in building technology for some of Government of India's key programs: MGNREGA, National Highways, PM Gram Sadak Yojana and Rural Housing. He has led many complex systems projects, but his most cherished projects remain simple interventions such as opening data and creating pathways for young public-spirited talent to join the government.

In that vein, he has recently co-founded a non-profit initiative called Bharat Digital, which aims to modernize and humanize how governments use technology is service of the public. In pursuit of that mission and creating a cadre of public technologists, the organization has launched the inaugural cohort of Build For Bharat Fellowship where final/pre-final year students in design, data and engineering are identified, equipped and deputed to government departments over the summer to work on impactful and mission-aligned technology projects.

Harsh Nisar

Reviews

Bang on. I would use this proposal as a reference while giving feedback to other proposers on how to talk about OSS mentorship/programs without gamifying open source. Super interesting program as well but would have liked more references.

Reviewer #1 Approved

Yes. This talk should be coordinated with the public policy devroom but be in the main track

Reviewer #2 Approved

It'll be a useful talk for students to understand the scope of FOSS projects beyond the Tech sector.

Reviewer #3 Approved

Very important especially for students attending, I would love to see this scale up as an initiative and more contributions happen to improve the government stack in India.

Reviewer #4 Approved