Maintaining a website and a as-real-time-as-possible blog for Project Sammaan has been extremely challenging for several reasons. The most basic challenge is simply getting people from the various organizations working on the project to contribute. This is certainly understandable, to a certain degree, considering that many of these people have no background, or even interest, in writing. The problem inherent in this recalcitrance though is the mandate to capture the Project Sammaan experience for inclusion in the end-deliverable of a toolkit that will help guide the efforts of others interested in replicating the project. After all, only you can share your story; no one else can know or adequately capture what your experience has been like.

This is well and truly an ancillary concern though, and one that we’ve taken great strides in addressing through various strategies, whether it be creating questionnaires for people to fill out and then work with me to structure the answers into some cogent and coherent narrative or simply me chasing after and threatening people to get them to contribute. The real issue (more…)

A lot of my work in Project Sammaan revolves around building strategic relationships with the various government departments in the BMC, the CMC and the Government of Odisha.

Some of the key departments that I interact regularly are:

Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC): BMC is one of the partners of Project Sammaan and is headed by the Mayor, who is an elected representative. From the administrative side, BMC is headed by the Commissioner; from Sammaan side, we have monthly review meetings of the project with the Commissioner.

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