A Mobile App for Citizens to Vote on Proposals and Civic Issues
Opened this issue · 8 comments
What problem are we trying to solve?
The communication gap between elected officials and their constituents. In an age of instant worldwide digital communication, there is no reason why the only contact we have with our elected officials comes every four years on election day. Voter engagement in civic life is low, largely because they do not feel empowered to affect outcomes. And elected officials do not have the resources to sift through the mountain of emails, phone calls, and letters to obtain an accurate picture of their constituent's needs and wants.
The Proposed Solution
We propose a mobile app called SpeakUp. The app presents users with a feed of issues affecting their area (based on GPS location data). Each issue is presented as a "proposal" which the user can either upvote or downvote to display support or opposition. The app allows users to subscribe to specific categories of interest, and drill down on a particular proposal for background info and links to external resources. Users can also submit their own proposals for some collective action, which followers can see. Voting totals for each proposal are prominently displayed, creating a transparent view for elected officials to gauge public opinion.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/jeffsenk/SpeakUp
Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?
Both Voters and Elected Representatives.
What help is needed at this time?
Primarily debugging and feedback on user experience of the app. If you are interested in being a beta tester, please leave a comment on this thread with your email address and device type (ios or android) and I will send you a link to download the app.
What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?
The basic structure of the app is complete. Feedback on the concept or feature suggestions are welcome.
How can we contact you outside of Github(list social media or places you're present)?
You can email me at jeff.senk@gmail.com
or DM on the open-austin slack channel at "jeffsenk"
Thanks for submitting, @jeffsenk! I'm moving this to "new" and giving you some tags.
@jeffsenk when you get a chance, writing a quick update after hack events makes it easier for folks to see what progress you have made.
Update:
At this past Civic Hack Saturday, 1/06 @jeffsenk got folks to do some user testing for his application. He walked away with a lot of caught bugs and got busy hacking on fixing them.
FYI, the URL in this issue (for https://github.com/jeffsenk/SpeakUp) seems to be pointing to a broken link or something.
@jeffsenk do you have a beta deployed somewhere for testing, or are you asking folks to deploy locally? Interested in checking it out!
@jeffsenk, holler if you're still working on this, it sounds interesting! My email is vicky.pridgen@ac4d.com/iOS.
I haven't seen @jeffsenk in awhile but I'd be interested to know where this landed!
Adding an Inactive tag and a link to Joshua Tauberer's So you want to reform democracy