Become a city captain

The 30-day verification cycle is the moat. Today, one maintainer makes the calls — which means we scale to roughly one city. You take responsibility for one city's verification cadence. The directory scales by the number of city captains.

This is the OAQ "monitor host" equivalent for geographic verification.

Instead of hosting a sensor, you host a responsibility: a city's records stay green on your watch. The volume is small (~10-20 records per city in v1) and the time is your time.

What you'd do

Pick a city you live in or know well. The cities we currently cover: Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune. New cities welcome.
Verify ~5-10 records per week — call the listed number, run the script (in CONTRIBUTING.md), update the YAML, commit.
Triage incoming reports for your city — dead-number flags, user reports, capacity-check requests. Either handle directly or escalate.
Maintain the data quality bar — every affiliation edge needs a source; every fare needs an observation date; every verification needs caller initials.

Time commitment

v1 (1-3 months in): ~2-3 hours/week. Most of it is phone calls during quiet office hours.
v2 (after 50+ records per city): ~4-5 hours/week. Re-verify cadence + report triage scale together.
v3 (if we get to 200+ records per city): reduce by recruiting deputy captains. This is a leadership role, not a perpetual phone-call shift.

What you absolutely DON'T do

Do not operate any ambulance. You're a verifier, not a dispatcher. Calls go to providers, never via you.
Do not negotiate fares with providers on behalf of patients. You record what's published; you don't advocate.
Do not represent the project commercially. Commercial licensing inquiries route to the maintainer, not to you.
Do not collect or store patient data. Ever.
Do not assert kickbacks, exclusive contracts, or motive on affiliation edges without a documented public source.

What you get

Merge rights for your city's data files once you've done your first 10 verified PRs. You become a co-maintainer for one geography.
Named credit in CONTRIBUTORS.md (opt-in) and in the city's records (as verified_by).
An optional honorarium once the Section 8 entity is registered and we have funding (₹2-5k/month per city captain).
Co-authorship on any research publication drawing on the city's dataset (if you contributed substantively).
Direct line to the maintainer for governance discussions. Captains are the proto-editorial-council; when the council forms in v2 (per GOVERNANCE.md), captains are first-pick members.

What we'd love to see in candidates

Familiarity with your city — you know the hospitals, you can spot a bogus address, you can place a call without explaining where Bannerghatta is.
Comfort making cold calls — most verifications are 2-minute phone calls with a script.
Basic GitHub literacy — opening a PR via the web editor is enough; you don't need to be a programmer.
Civic-tech / public-health background is a plus but not required. Nurses, ASHA workers, students, retired doctors, journalists, NGO workers all welcome.
A reliable monthly rhythm. Two ad-hoc shifts a month is better than five intense days followed by silence.

Onboarding

Express interest below.
Maintainer schedules a 30-minute call. Walks you through the protocol, the privacy boundaries, the GitHub flow.
Pair-verification on your first 3 records — you call, maintainer reviews the YAML edit.
You go solo. Merge rights granted after 10 successful verified PRs.
Recognised in the next CHANGELOG release.

Privacy commitment for captains

We collect your name, city, email, phone — used solely for coordination, training, and direct support. Never sold, never traded, never marketed. See privacy policy and no-marketing policy. Withdraw at any time; your contributions stay attributed to you (if opted-in) but no further communication.