Headed back home to San Francisco, after another exhausting but satisfying trip to India. This trip was a combination of visits and meetings with our team, NGOs, software partners and our funders. Am both humbled and proud to see our team at work, our collaboration with our software and data partners and more recently the deep relationships we are building with a few foundations across India.
The team and the community have embraced our blogging culture. We already have quite a few blogs from the NGOs and team who attended the Glific, Avni, Project Tech4Dev and Dalgo sprints. Also, a bunch of new case studies from the fCxO gathering thanks to a concerted push by Mohd Shamoon, a veteran Tech4Dev engineer (and now leader and only member of the Fractional Tech Team!)
A few highlights and things that we might need a re-think of from this trip, in my preferred listicle format
- Visited Tamil Nadu and Chennai for the first time and am always amazed by the diversity, beauty and terrain of the country, along with a small peak into the culture (with an emphasis on food and coffee). Met Merlia from Madhi who graciously spent a few hours with me educating me on both the education system in TN / India and the contribution of TN to the Indian economy. Love the work that her team does in combination with the government to make a systemic impact across the state. Also met Dr. Prahlatan from Bhumi who gave me a good overview of the volunteering sector in India, the challenges that Bhumi tackles and how the volunteering conference (VolCon) which they started has evolved over the years. Gives us a roadmap for how we can structure Tech4Impact (our stab at an NGO Tech Conference in India) going forward. Also spent the weekend in Chennai and loved walking through old Chennai and seeing the hustle and bustle in the city. The central part has not been infected with modern buildings, which is a good thing, IMO 🙂
- At the sprints, my favourite thing is the morning and evening walks and chatting with partners who are on the walk. Get to learn in detail the work they are doing, the way their program operates and the role the individual plays in the organization. In specific I enjoyed learning about e-Vidyaloka from Nitya and their reach of the program using a volunteer teacher model all conducted remotely. Had an interesting discussion with Shivangi and Anita from Goonj on how to manage and influence change in larger NGOs. Along similar lines, a discussion with Jayesh from Lend-a-Hand India on bringing in tech internally and the challenges of building a team to manage complex projects. An interesting discussion with Gautamraj from Reap Benefit on the power of open source and collaboration, but being flexible and focusing on building good solutions for NGOs at an affordable price is what we are aiming for,
- Always grateful to the ecosystem for being so generous with their time and knowledge. Rajsekhar from Digital Green came down and shared his knowledge with the group about the work DG has been doing in the area of AI/LLMs. More details on how we are approaching the AI platform and the sprint by Akhilesh and Nishika are here. It’s kinda cool to kickstart a new project with a set of our peers and build things collaboratively
- Erica and I met Bhagwan Thacker from the Empowerment Foundation at the Dasra office in Mumbai along with Apurva (Dasra’s AI Lead). It’s always useful to lay out our plan with a funder primarily because you have to put it in a nice logical manner. Kinda cool to see how the interplay of roles and words we use happens with Erica, Vinod and me since we don’t practice this. It’s gotten a lot better in the past year as we do funder meetings together. At times we also have differing opinions on our approach (or what we’ve done), and talking about that with an external person seems ok. We managed to squeeze in a quick meeting with our board member, Shilpa Kumar in Mumbai as we headed to the airport. Always grateful to Shilpa for asking us the hard questions and also being the person who pushed Tech4Dev hard to build a team in India (at which point we hired Erica). Earlier this week we met with the team from Fidelity International Foundations, a current funder, where we spoke about our work, our approach and where we are headed. It seemed to resonate with the management team visiting from the UK and I suspect they got a better understanding of why we need to also think about working with the ecosystem and build for the sector.
- In the past couple of years, we’ve worked closely with the A.T.E. Chandra Foundation with their Rejuvenating Water Bodies (RWB) project across our 3 platforms (Avni, Dalgo and Glific). This year, we’ve also started work with the Veddis Foundation in the engagement with different state governments in their Rural Livelihood Mission initiatives. From an operational level, our conversations with their team have exposed us to working with the government, managing their expectations, and at the same time listening and adapting to ground-level realities. They’ve also pushed us and ensured that we deliver a high-quality, reliable product with minimal manual intervention. This has been a bit hard with the probabilistic nature of LLMs, but has helped us (with Jerome White’s amazing guidance) to build an evaluation system for this case. Our work with Veddis, Glific and Dalgo is driving the features we are adding to our upcoming AI Platform
- Vinod and I wrapped up our trip with a day-long meeting with Hrishi, Raju and Sreekanth from the Azim Premji Foundation. Hrishi has been an amazing thought partner but at the same time very open with his thoughts and experiences, what might work, and where we can do better. It was cool to see all their experiments with Frappe across their grantees, specifically building specific solutions for their NGOs using a nice low-code abstraction tool via Frappe. We then switched to what they were experimenting with from an AI perspective. There is a significant intersection between their work and our work. Their commitment to continue exploring this space makes them a great collaborator for our AI Platform and we are planning to do stuff together. Our Bangalore team will spend a day with them in the next few weeks and we’ll figure out where and how we can work together. Super excited about the potential for this partnership
- Seeing and talking with these foundation partners is encouraging and a great validation of the model and what we are doing. A few years back, it was a different story. I do think that both foundations and evolved, and at the same time, we’ve matured (or so I hope) and have a better lens on where things are and how we can best serve the larger ecosystem. These relationships will grow and thrive, and I’m curious to see the direction in which they evolve
