Bangalore Civic Compass
- Civic Tech ·
- Tools ·
- Volunteering
What is Civic Compass?
So, let’s say you want to file a municipality complaint in Bangalore. You will need to know your ward number. Or let’s say you are trying to figure out which police station has jurisdiction over your address. A lot of our government websites expect citizens to already know these details. There is no place where you can simply enter your address and get these relevant details.
To bridge that gap, we at Zen Citizen built a tool called the Civic Compass. With just your address, it helps you identify important civic information like your ward details, the right municipality office, or the correct police station.
Ideally, government websites should provide this level of usability, and we hope they get there and they will. But until then, we’re stepping in to make that access simpler and more humane.
You can check it out here.
Next Steps
At the moment Civic Compass works only for Bangalore, but we’ve actually built it in a way that it can be extended to other cities very easily. The code is completely open source
The real challenge is that getting all this civic data isn’t straightforward. A lot of it isn’t public, so we’ve had to file formal RTI applications to get the verified data. Because of that we share a ready-to-use RTI template and guidance on how to request information from the government in the correct format.