A WhatsApp Chat Bot for Citizen Journalism in Rural India
System programming & HCI master's thesis enabling citizen journalism over WhatsApp for rural communities in Chhattisgarh, India.
| Feb 2021 – June 2021 | System Programming · HCI · Master’s Thesis |
CGNet Swara is an NGO that provides a voice-based citizen journalism platform to remote communities of Chhattisgarh, India that are unreachable by mainstream media.
In line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, I developed from scratch a chat interface for citizen journalism over WhatsApp to scale up the voices of remote communities in Chhattisgarh — unreachable by media and local authorities, but increasingly having access to smartphones and mobile data.
The bot enables users to listen to local issues by sending in their location, and to submit stories through audio, image, or video attachments.
Impact
- Saved man-hours of staff by automating the end-to-end pipeline from receiving stories on WhatsApp to uploading on the staff back-end interface and public-facing website
- The deployed system continued to be in use and successfully crowdsourced 500+ video and audio reports in 9 weeks from low-literate marginalised users, promoting content from the next billion users on the Internet
- Reported stories comprised governance issues, successful impact of the NGO’s intervention, and incidents of violence — helping preserve and document cultural processions, rituals, and traditions of the community
- Presented a demonstration of the work accepted for publication at the ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS ‘21)