Diffindo!

Try our demo here, or catch our hackathon sharing on Youtube!

What is Diffindo

Tracked-changes interface for civil servants to quickly take submissions modified in outlook, and easily accept/ reject each change.

Why Diffindo?

It is currently very time/consuming and manual for public servants to incorporate manual edits (e.g. colour changes, strikethroughs) when bosses and collaborators edit their submissions directly on MS outlook, as each new piece of feedback would be made manually in different colors and styles without any kind of change-tracking interface. A public servant would have to integrate these individual feedbacks manually, and go through several of these editing rounds in order to get a document approved. This whole process can be much simplified if there was a track changes-type interface.

What was the biggest challenge in this project?

Getting the site whitelisted for use on SIS for Secure Email users - we didn’t even know this was an issue, until a non-GovTech user tested the site. The process is likely to take some time, limiting the usefulness of the product only to a minority of public servants.

Fun facts!

One interesting finding:
It was easy to get the code to recognize strikethrough and delete the corresponding text

One thing you’d have done differently:
Get a designer to weigh in so the site is more standalone.

Others:
Shoutout to 35FC community for useful feature suggestions, and other colleagues across govt!