 So stepping into our next case study, I'm happy to introduce our next speaker, Ms. Anuja Pitre, co-founder at Reach, Pune, India. She is currently working in her company, Reach, where she runs ideation and design. Her work is aimed at inviting people to engage in informed, accessible conversations relating to public and social interest. And also serves as a house illustrator. We are all very pleased to have Ms. Anuja Pitre here with us to discuss how we took a step towards empowering the citizens of the largest democracy in the world. So please welcome her with a huge applause. Thank you for the introduction. My name is Anuja, and I'm here today to talk about an experiment called The Sides. So I'm a visual designer and illustrator from Pune, and I'm a co-founder of a company called Reach, like she said. And earlier this year, in March, we launched a web app and initiative called The Sides. And what it does is it gives you verified, bite-sized information, sorry, about the government of India. And the way it works is this is what you see on your screen when you go on the website, a bite-sized fact along with its source, and two questions that help you go to the next fact. So when you click on a question, and it goes on and on. So if you're someone with some curiosity and an internet connection, this could entertain you for maybe two minutes or even two hours if you're really, really interested in the government. Why we made this was for the general election this year. And I'm going to go straight in this because I wanted you to see this before I tell you why we felt the need to make something like this. So I work at a company called Reach. And what we do is we create data collection frameworks for NGOs and CSR initiatives. And what that means is we sit down with them, we understand their objectives, and we assist them in collecting their data of their work and then help make sense of it. And what we do by doing this is we're very close to how data is actually created and the methodology behind it. So as people who work in this area, we started to get really, really sensitive about, say, things like misinformation and fake news that are becoming a massive, massive problem in this country. We also, and not just the WhatsApp forwards, I'm not talking about only Facebook and what gets shared on WhatsApp, it's also the news and how you can see when something is really dodgy. So when people are just randomly quoted or the sources in mentioned, you know that this may be taken out of context a little bit. So in that light, in October 2018, we had a big realization that we were only seven or eight months away from the election. And maybe it was time to do something. We were a very, very small team of four people. But things were about to get explosive. So we said, OK, let's just dive in now and see what we can do in the next five months. So what happened is we just arbitrarily started to devise, just validate what we were thinking in the first place. Our assumptions were that there wasn't quality information available, verifiable information available. So we went out and interviewed about 20 people in Pune in October 18. Ages 22 to 40. And that was also very arbitrary, because it was eight years older than us and eight years younger than us. And we just assumed that maybe since we are facing this problem, that is a good bracket to go with. So there were two insights that came up when we were interviewing these people that were felt by all 20 of them. The first one was that they all thought traffic in the neighborhood sucked. So that was the first insight, which we decided to park, because maybe it's a thing to solve for another time. And the second one was they were skeptical about the news that they were receiving. And everyone was saying, maybe this specific publication has this political agenda behind it. Or we don't really know if what we're receiving is the government even making valid information? We don't know what we're receiving. So this is something that we got all 20 of them said this. Something to just add here is then we asked them, OK, so what do you do before you go vote then? How do you make the decision if everything is untrue? And they said that they talk to people in their family that are elders, who they think have a better insight into the political system. So everyone said they talk to someone they think they trust or is informed. But other than that, that's their final word. So we took this information and realized that we needed to do something about, I mean, make a platform that doesn't feel like it's lying to you, as well as it is neutral, which is, in a sense, agenda-free. And that's a very, very tall ask from four people who are sitting in Pune trying to turn this situation around. So we decided to put our hands in it anyway and see how information is being presented to us right now. So I mean, take a look at, so what does it really mean to be neutral? OK. Take a look at this fact. It says the Election Commission of India adopted the symbol system to represent parties in 1951 when the literacy rate was only 16%. This seems like a fairly neutral fact. However, there are words in it that might form a bias, something as simple as only. And what happens when a word like only is used, and maybe it was intended to mean that 16% in 1951 is just lower than 74% today. OK, that's maybe all it means. Except based on what you've read just before this or what you've been hearing your entire life, you may think that 16% was low for India in 1951. Maybe you should have done better. Or that 16% was extremely low in the global sense. That every other country was doing much better than India, and maybe that's what it means. And if you just look at this fact now, it might seem harmless. But as these facts start layering in your mind, you're already forming a narrative that you don't even realize you've created. Maybe it's about how badly India is doing. Maybe it's about how well India is doing. So what we started to do was take facts like these. Started stripping it off all its emotion, interpretation, and what we were left with is pretty dry, boring facts. So we threw in some definitions, policy information, and now we were left with a bank of really, really dry, bite-sized facts. And now this is not enough for people to consume it. It's extremely boring. Imagine just seeing this one after the other. So we started to, there was a new challenge, which is how do we get people to actually consume this really boring information? Because we can't now go back and create, put flavor into it because flavor means neutral, not neutral. So we started looking at how we are receiving our news, and just a simple format would be an article in a paper. So this is what it would look like. There would be a heading. There's a start, there's a finish, and there's a start to finish narrative. And while reading this article, just for a moment, I think that there are five types of people viewing this article. One would feel reassured by what they are reading. So yes, this is exactly what I've been thinking. Two, one would feel agitated. No, this goes against everything I've been thinking about. Three, skeptical, which is I don't know where this information is coming from. Four, confused. I read something totally different before this. I was convinced, and I'm convinced by this as well. Or I'm not convinced by anything, and now I don't know where to go. A five, apathetic, absolutely indifferent to this topic, which, and all of these are extremely fair, because every human being will have their own set of experiences and will come thinking about this a certain way. And so be it, this is what the narrative asks for. But, and we've all been these five people at different points in time reading different types of information. And especially with today's day and age, when data is so available, data on personal profiles is so available, it's very easy to create content or write information to get these exact same reactions. So what we try to do is, let's see if this narrative can be destroyed, or rather, let's see if this narrative can be taken back into our hands. Is there a way to do that? So we started to break this articles like these down and extract verifiable facts out of them, okay? So let's just say this journalist has done their research and the first one is about, this article is about the Statue of Unity. And the first fact would be about the budget. The second is about how many people were engaged in making the Statue of Unity. And the third would be a little, maybe a little disconnected but still contextual, which is there were protests happening by farmers about the Statue of Unity because the funds were siphoned to the Statue and not them. And so it talks about a statistic about the district's working population in agriculture. So we took these facts and we just flipped fact two and three to see if the narrative still stays. Now the narrative says something, could say something totally different here, which is that's the budget. This is how many people are engaged in agriculture, but this is how much employment we created. And you're left with a totally different thought at the end of the article. And this is the power of narratives that we're reading in newspapers today, which I might add are very relevant, but if that's the only information that we're getting, then maybe there's a reason we feel like we're being lied to. So what we did was we took these facts and deconstructed them so that it could be read anyhow. Then we added another layer of related facts and we expanded that network to a whole other bunch of facts that we created that could be connected together and viewed anyhow. So essentially you could view this information in any order and that means you have your very own narrative. So now that we had this whole architecture, there was one last piece of neutrality that we needed to figure out, which is okay, this needs to have a face. People are going to use this ultimately as an interface and what would that look like if everything we stand for is neutral and maybe black and white and it's not the only way to go. So how do we create an interface that still is neutral? So the information that the inspiration that seemed obvious to look into was bureaucracy, which is in a sense more neutral than elected representatives. We've all seen what a stamp paper looks like. We've all filed our income taxes. We've interfaced with a lot of these documentation. So what we decided to do is take this as a visual language forward because that's truly what neutralizes this country, whether it means through annoyance or standing in lines or whatever it is, every one of us is interfaced with it. So this is what we took forward for our interface and the hero of our interface, which is what we've established here is that we didn't take the journalistic sources for any of this information. We took primary sources, which is where the information is first released. And then we added a layer of navigation, which is what takes you to the next fact and these are randomly generated for each user so that no two people have the same narrative. And we added a few more features to it. And recently a search button that helps you that helps you choose your starting point to the interface, which means that if you're interested in a fact about agriculture, that's how you start. And finally, the name of this, which is we realized that nothing makes sense if it's not placed with something else, besides something else. So this is what our app finally ended up looking like. However, sorry, I'll just take you through the timeline, which is from October to December, we did user tests, interviews, created the prototype. By February, we had an architecture design and development for that. We literally just went and talked to a bunch of people that could have been interested in something like this and we've put this together with barely any resources and everyone's come together to just make this happen. Of course, it's not a sustainable option, which I'll get to towards the end of the presentation. And finally, content and guidelines, content guidelines and curation, which is the entire thing that I told you about how facts can be written without biases and how they can be connected to form your own narratives. And finally, we launched in March. We continue to update it and build on social media, post that. But this is where stuff got a little murky because we wanted, there was a lot of promise in this and we were clearly meeting and we were looking into a latent unmet need, which was getting fulfilled and we needed to sustain this. So how do we do this now when new being neutral is something that we needed to keep in the center? We needed some money, which was even more tricky once we got into the neutral aspect of it. So when we started to look at what our options were, we looked at paid access. So let's just say this thing became successful. Would we put facts behind a payment gateways? And that wasn't an option. Because we wanted access for all. The second thing was sell user data. Now, as tempted as we were to use this user data because that would give us so many insights about how people lean politically and everything and we could design it accordingly and but we've now refrained from it and we've refrained from using it for anything else as well. Ads, this thing was already so dry that a layer of ads would just send the user away so it would be the ultimate anti-product. So we decided to not use ads. And the final thing was investors. And what we realized is we were too nascent and too young to align with the agenda of either an individual or a company who would come in either with money or resources. So that wasn't an option. So we had exhausted all our options and what I guess we were left with was our core idea which is using verifiable nuggets of information as a product. And what does that look like? So we thought of a different medium to use it in. Took a subset of that data and created a game. If you are familiar with trump cards that were made for wrestlers and cricketers and race cars, this is what we ended up making for the elected representatives of the Lok Sabha. And this is all verifiable information that's available in the form of scanned affidavits with the Election Commission of India. So we created this game and we did a crowdfunding campaign around it. So I'm just gonna show you the promotional video. By the way, we also made this video with the hope that we get to test it on these four kids that we invited to be a part of this video because by then we'd exhausted all our resources. So there was no time or money to conduct any user tests at all. That was our promotional video for the cards. And the fun thing was that we got these kids to actually play with the cards and at the end of it they'd chosen who their favorite politicians were based on absolutely nothing because they didn't know who those politicians were before they played with the cards and they chose them based on who this guy is, the oldest he must know the most or this is the youngest I like her. So it was a fun way to engage them in this and see what the future of these cards could be. The campaign is successful so these cards will be available soon on some online shop. Moving forward, this is what our analytics looked like for besides, which was terrible. So and this is something that we'd anticipated going in because it was an experiment, resources were short, we had no marketing budgets whatsoever. So at the end of this, I think what we realized is that that's not what we'd started off doing. It was an experiment and that there were a lot of disguised wins that we realized we came across towards the end of this. This is the start of our social media campaign that we started. So as she mentioned, I am the in-house illustrator and graphic designer. So this was something that was very easy for me to create. Again, we chose a language that was, I guess it just offset the politically charged nature of things during the time, which is why we used black and white cartoons. So this was the teaser. What we did later was we stayed away from content which required us to cherry pick facts from our website itself, which means that we were giving more preference to some facts over others and we wanted to stay away from something like that. So instead, we focused a lot on the election process itself. So this one talks about where your vote actually goes. So you're actually voting for your MP and not your PM and what you can do to check who is representing your constituency. Another type of post we did was the manifesto showdown, which is we compared different parties and the aspects, different parties on different aspects of their manifesto. This one was about published languages. So we showed what languages the manifestos were available in which also shows the access immediately. These were the other types of posts that we made, which is just to get people to understand what this app was all about. Another thing that we did to engage them is illustrations. This is a campaign called 36 Days of Type. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but we did one on election symbols that are made available by the Election Commission of India. And we did one covering each aspect of our campaign in our country. So this one was talking about electrification. The second one was about climate change. Third one was about sports budgets. And this is how we covered about 36 topics about India and that's how we decided to communicate. Of course, our social media was way more popular than the app itself because I guess that's the kind of media that people are used to looking at. And we also had an internal joke about maybe we should have just gone with the social media stuff instead, instead of making the whole app. But of course, there is something else that we learned from the app itself, okay? Which is when we were creating this entire content, what we realized is that designing for neutrality made us realize that we weren't neutral. So when we were putting together sources of information and seeing which source is better than the other or more than better, just what to choose to put on there because time was limited. We started to realize that we were favoring certain things over others. And maybe that's not the way to go ahead. Three people sitting in a room maybe is not the greatest way to create something that's truly neutral. So that was the first learning. The second one was that most of our study are angry and not all have the privilege to explain why. So we got a lot of qualitative feedback about how people were using this app. I think a tool that they got to use during the course of the election, including conversations with their own parents. The third is, and this is my favorite, which is we finally discovered a center for the left and right to meet. When we were doing our user tests in the beginning, we did an exercise called card sorting. And what we did on those cards was we just gave them 50 facts and invited a group of four people at a time that are more likely to fight with each other than anyone else. And when we presented these facts, everyone suddenly had a shared reality, which means that nobody was arguing about the facts itself. So only when they put, they said, okay, we have this reality now. We have this common truth. Now what are we going to do with it? Which means that they were willing to work. They reached a consensus faster and they were willing to work together to get to the end of whatever game we had planned for them. So that was one of the things that came out in the user testing, but also followed through right till the campaign, where the social media campaign, where a lot of left-wing activists, as well as celebrities were sharing our posts, and a lot of right-wing accounts were following us, including publications and newspapers that talked about how we were applauding the BJP's achievements. And it maybe was validating as a team for us to know that both sides were equally for us and they felt like we were on their side somehow. And the last thing, which is there's a way to take our power back, especially when the cards were out, we got asked a lot of questions about how does this politician have only zero criminal cases or is this politician, or have they only declared these many assets and is that correct information? And the truth is that is the only truth we have access to, which means that there is a way to get better information if you want it, which means that what we've done is at least given you information for you to then ask for better information. So this is somehow a gateway to get, to ask for better information, take the power back in our own hands. And the last thing we realize is we are as slow or fast as our society progresses. And by that we were wondering if this app would ever become trendy. And I think that was a question that we all had, which is we were struggling with all of this social media and say we planned an entire marketing strategy around it. Unless as a society we start asking for better information, we won't have any use for this app. But that is the struggle. So through initiatives like say, monthly cards and other things that are already engaging us and getting our mind space, we want to maybe nudge the society to ask for better information. And finally, this is how we want to grow. One is we want more decentralized content. And right now it is pretty centralized because the three of us are creating the content. And the third one is aligned partners, which is I talked about investors in the beginning, but now that we have a solid ground to base this on and we've realized that this is actually, this can be productized. We are looking for aligned partners to work with so that this can actually become a reality. And the final slide is, this is the first post we put out on Instagram. And I think we just circle back to this each time, which is imagine a world where every conversation is an informed one. Yeah, thank you. Guys. Thank you.