ActiveCitizenParticipation

I developed an application for citizen participation. With help of map-markers they can add their ideas to a place. Other citizens can upvote an request, so that politics see what the people demand.

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Inspiration

Based on trends in eGovernment which means basically to communicate information with citizens, the highest developed stage is interaction. Most solutions enable unidirectional communication, e.g. protocols of council meetings. I want to motivate citizens with a low-treshhold solution to participate actively in their local area. The process for this looks until today like this: I have a wish to improve the area you are living in. Then you have to lookup for some contacts in the administration or a politican and write them. This means that you must invest lot of your worthful time. Additional the administration can ran in problems if there would be too much requests and then they will not work on your idea, no matter how good it is.

What it does

Users can mark places with on a map and write down notes for their request. For example they see that there are way to less parking-lots for bicycles near to the main campus of TUM. Other people can upvote this request and comment it. Its possible to give contra-arguments as well. Request with similar content can be merged together if they are locally near. Administration an politics can see all requests and sort them by relevancy to quickly react on misconditions.

How we built it

To speed up the development, I have used the popular PHP-Framework Laravel for the backend-stuff and Bootstrap for the UI.

Challenges we ran into

At some places the code-quality was not the focus because the time is short.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even though I had worked alone on this project, I have met the requirements and ideas I had imagined for this project to implement during the hackathon. At some place in the application I went even further and implemented additional features and reworked the design of the UI.

What we learned

How to integrate OSM-data into a project and which possibilities this opens.

What's next for ActiveCitizenParticipation

With an mobile app the users could be enabled to enter request more easily because they will not have to lookup the location on the map. Also with integration of natural language processing techniques similar topics can be better matched and unpolite comments would be filtered out.

Please note that you need a password to access the demo site due to legal reasons. I will send it you via discord. Alternatively you can ask per mail: denis@graipel.de

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