Build for Bharat Fellowship: Pull-Requesting Change in Government
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
Session Categories
Which track are you applying for?
Speakers
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.
Yes. This talk should be coordinated with the public policy devroom but be in the main track
It'll be a useful talk for students to understand the scope of FOSS projects beyond the Tech sector.
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.