Project description:

Despite the lightning speeds of modern technology, communication between people and our leaders is still often shallow and inefficient. We’re creating a tool where citizens and our leaders can learn more about each others’ thoughts and actions, so leaders can understand how to best serve their constituents, and so citizens can regain confidence that our leaders are representing us well.

There’s no shortage of evidence that institutional decision-making is often decoupled from the public. On many issues, there are significant discrepancies between the beliefs and values of citizens and the policies that we live under–and this phenomenon contributes to the recent deficit of trust in government and decline of democracy globally. We don’t want this to happen, so we launched an endeavor to use digital technology to revamp our social technology.

We’re building a platform where citizens can contribute their viewpoints on the issues they care about. We’re going to place this information alongside a list of relevant actions that leaders have taken, so that everyone can see if there’s a stark discrepancy between citizen opinion and leader actions. We’re also leveraging this platform as a civil forum to generate new ideas, reach compromises, and forge movements, so that everyday citizens with busy lives are empowered to help change the world.

If you’re interested in helping us build a more democratic world, you can find more about us on our project page, and you can contact aman.patel@usc.edu for more information.

We need talented front-end (Flutter) and back-end (Node.js) developers to help us prepare for upcoming pilot programs, and we’d love to have you on our team!