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Last month I wrote about my volunteering project with Zen Citizen on translating the death registration form into plain English. This form gave me a chance to work closely with the founder of Zen Citizen, Vineeta Kommineni. Today's post features Vineeta and her organization and takes a look at their work from a plain language perspective.
Founded close to two years ago, Zen Citizen is a volunteer-driven initiative that explains procedures in simple language and shares hacks/workarounds and undocumented information to help citizens independently apply for services.
When Vineeta’s father passed away, she visited government offices many times to get documentation done. Each time she would be turned away by the staff asking for some or the other missing detail or document. The intent was clear: to wear her out enough to push her into paying a bribe.
It didn’t really work that way. Eventually, Zen Citizen happened. While the core idea behind Zen Citizen is to empower citizens to access government services easily and on their own, the deeper goal is to fight against corruption, Vineeta told me in a telephonic interview.
“Why should a citizen take the help of even middlemen to exercise their rights? Often the middlemen’s fee covers the bribe,” Vineeta said.
The struggle for information is real in India. Finding out the police station, revenue district, or municipal ward your house is a part of should be just a few clicks away in this day and age. But it isn’t. One of Zen Citizen’s initial projects, Civic Compass, solved this for the residents of Bengaluru.
Other tools Vineeta’s team have built are Kaveri Village Finder that helps you locate your property within the revenue department’s maps and Kaveri Image Resizer, a nifty way to resize photos for marriage certificate applications. These tools are workarounds for buggy government websites that frustrate and slow down users.
Plain language in Zen Citizen’s work
“It isn’t enough to say file an affidavit. It needs to be explained in plain language. And in the absence of such information, Zen Citizen comes in. What’re the different ways in which something can be misunderstood? We must look at all that.
“Writing in plain language is not difficult. The hard part is caring enough about the user to do it,” Vineeta said.
Her current work with Seva Sindhu is to translate government forms into plain English. It’s a portal that hundreds of thousands of people visit everyday to avail of services such as birth or death certificate, police verification certificate, bus passes, and so on. “We are currently working only on the text and not doing any changes in the backend or redesigning the UX as that’s a safe, low-friction place to begin,” she informed me.
But plain language often goes deeper than text: it is about design and, as earlier noted, about empathy – aka getting into the user’s shoes. So I asked Vineeta what her approach would be if a change needs to go deeper than the text level. Take, for instance, the language field in the death registration form. Getting clarity on how to fill this field is not simply about editing the text or providing an explanatory note – see my post on this last month. This one field is enough to show that the form was not designed in a user-first way.
To this, Vineeta replied, “We started with writing guides to help citizens navigate dysfunctional systems with less frustration. Our goal was to make the best of the situation. We did not want to fight the system or try to convince the government to change its processes—that felt like a battle for another day.”
Fair enough. One must choose their battles and Zen Citizen has chosen theirs. Plain language is, of course, central to any work that strives to bring clarity to government processes. One does start with the text, but usually the work grows beyond it.
