C4GT — My Journey Into GovTech
I started my journey into the world of GovTech under the C4GT program. The magnanimous amount of knowledge that I have been able to acquire thanks to my mentors, respected panelists, fellow contributors, and the entire C4GT team came as a grand addition to my existing skill set. This blog acts as a window into the inner workings and details of this program and how I navigated them during this 2 month period. I hope it educates you, enlightens you, and most importantly excites you about GovTech.
About C4GT
Q. What is C4GT ?
Code For GovTech (Government Technology), also known as C4GT in short, is a program aimed at introducing selected contributors from all over India to Open Source GovTech in order to provide them an opportunity to create meaningful communities and create impact at scale.
Code for GovTech (C4GT) is an annual summer coding program to create a community that can build and contribute to global digital public goods. If you want to use Open Source GovTech to create impact, then this is the opportunity for you! C4GT is being organized by Samagra and supported by Omidyar Network India.
For more details about eligibility criteria, projects, mentors, and contributors involved in C4GT 2022, you can check their Website.
They also have a highly engaged Discord Community which you can join. You can interact with mentors, and fellow contributors and also get all your doubts cleared. Do check out and follow their other pages as well on : LinkedIn, Github and YouTube.
Q. What does the C4GT timeline look like ?
C4GT ’22 started accepting contributor applications on 20th May, 2022 up till 10th June 2022. You can always go ahead and take a look at their official website in order to get access to a detailed timeline as well as the projects involved.
- Proposal Submission Period (20th May 2022 to 10th June 2022): Interested contributors with some prior experience in Open Source (helps) work round the clock to create a detailed proposal jotting down implementation details of the projects they have chosen to work on as well as a timeline with key milestones which they would be following if selected. Mentors are extremely helpful and you might want to get the drafts of your proposals checked before the final submission. I personally submitted my draft on 9th June 2022 and did my final submission on 10th June 2022. You can submit a total of 3 proposals.
- Proposal Review Period (10th June to 17th June): Project mentors go through each and every proposal and shortlist the best proposals.
- (Round 1) Shortlisting of Proposals: After going through all the proposals the mentors shortlist a handful of possible candidates for the next round. I got my shortlisting email on 14th June 2022.
- (Round 2) 1: 1 Session with Mentor: The selected candidates are then invited to a one-on-one session with the project mentor during which they are required to explain their proposals, answer questions that the mentor may have, and convince them about their passion towards open source and the C4GT program. My 1: 1 session was conducted on 15th June 2022. - Announcement of Shortlisted Contributors (18th June): After the completion of both rounds the final list of selected contributors is released. I received my final selection mail on 17th June 2022.
- Coding Period (June 20th, 2022 to June 31st, 2022): As the name suggests, contributors spend time coding and implementing their proposed features during this time. This period includes constant interaction and meetings with project mentors who guide you and help you out in case you get stuck anywhere. In my case, the coding period started on 20th June 2022 and was later extended till 17th August 2022.
- Midpoint Evaluation: Present and demonstrate the code, documentation, and architecture which you have created up until that point. Midpoint Evaluation of C4GT 2022 was on 10th July 2022. It is preceded by a Pre Midpoint Huddle (ours was on 6th July, 2022)
- Endpoint Evaluation: Present and demonstrate the code, documentation, and architecture which you have created over the entire coding period. The endpoint evaluation of C4GT 2022 was on 17th August 2022. It is preceded by a Pre Endpoint Huddle (ours was on 8th August 2022) - Final Code Submission, Final Evaluation by Mentors, Final Results Announcement: Following the endpoint evaluation and final submission of your code, mentors evaluate the entire work you have done during the coding period, and the final results are announced.
My Experience
Hi! My name is Ansh Sarkar and I worked on the Competency Passbook project during the C4GT 2022 cohort.
Although it won’t be possible to condense the immense amount of knowledge that I’ve been exposed to while navigating this program in a small blog, I’ll try to summarize my entire journey and focus only on the critical and crucial milestones.
I came to know about C4GT via a random Google search. I had always wanted to contribute to GovTech after my first year itself. I began looking for projects to which I could contribute and found one that caught my eye, Competency Passbook. The project was in a very nascent stage with only the requirements jotted down in a ReadMe file. This meant that we were required to design everything starting from the architecture all the way to the documentation and implementation of the first working prototype of the framework, something that excited me even more about the project.
I ended up submitting only one single, detailed proposal for the Competency Passbook. It got selected and I got the invite for the second round almost immediately after. The one-on-one mentor session went exceptionally well and in no time I received my final acceptance email. This was followed by a great and insightful inauguration event and an onboarding call with our respective mentors during which we decided how to proceed with the implementation of the entire project.
We were initially planning to design the entire architecture on top of a custom-implemented private blockchain network but later we realized that the gas fee for implementing it on a large scale would quickly escalate (we were using Geth). While exploring other solutions we realized that the VC Data Model is based on top of a DID Ecosystem could also be used to achieve the required results and while making the entire system more scalable and interoperable.
I soon figured out that a lot more knowledge was required about these topics before I could get started and therefore while learning more about them, ended up stumbling upon the SSI Ecosystem (Self Sovereign Identity). In case you would like to know more about this you can refer to this mind-blowing book on SSI : Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials. It helped me immensely to identify the use cases which SSIs could solve and the pillars on which the entire ecosystem builds upon.
We spent about a week finalizing the architecture and documenting everything to make implementation easier and have something everyone could agree upon. The following weeks mainly involved lots of coding and frequent meets with our mentors. About halfway through the coding period, we had our mid-point evaluation in the presence of eminent panelists Mr. Jagadish Babu (COO, EkStep), Mr. Manish Srivastava (CTO, eGov Foundation), and Mr. Ravi Prakash (Head of Architecture, Beckn Foundation) and I will forever be grateful for their valuable feedbacks and insights.
The completion of the mid-point evaluation was followed by even more coding, with contributors working wholeheartedly towards implementing all the proposed features and key milestones. During this second half of the program, we were also encouraged to take peer-to-peer sessions (among the selected contributors) and for the things which I’ve been able to learn from these sessions, I am truly grateful.
I had to learn a lot of new things including frameworks such as NextJS and React Native. This has truly resulted in greater self-confidence and enhanced my ability to learn and implement things within a constrained amount of time. It has been lots of learning, lots of fun, tons of coding, and a plethora of new experiences, thoughts, and insights. The importance of clean code, documentation, and proper planning has become more and more apparent over the weeks and some of the best practices I learned are here to stay for my future projects as well.
The best part of my experience was getting in touch with like-minded developers and prominent people in the field of GovTech! Being a part of this wonderful cohort has helped me hone my skills not only as a developer but also as a communicator who can articulate his thoughts and ideas in an easy-to-understand manner. So my overall experience was great fun and stress-free. I had a blast!
If you’re seriously considering contributing to GovTech, you should definitely go ahead. It feels gratifying. I shall continue working on my project as an active contributor and maintainer and hopefully mentor the same for the C4GT ’23 cohort! Choose a project you like, contribute beforehand if possible, communicate with the community, and make a concise, well-thought-out proposal. That’s all from my side! Good luck!
