CitizenVoice

Inspiration

The current political landscape is filled with declining trust in institutions and a need for more democratic participation. Our goal was to leverage technology to harness the collective intelligence of citizens and solve shared problems in their communities.

What it does

Educates Citizens from a randomly selected pool of candidates, on different problems their community faces, obtained from NLP generation, with the goal of aiding them to make an informed decision.

How we built it

We started by researching existing solutions for citizen engagement and deliberation, and identified the need for a more scalable solution. We then developed a program that facilitates deliberation and decision-making among residents in a community. This program first identifies the problem that needs to be solved and gathers a representative sample of the population via web scraping. It then provides important information for the recruited representatives to make informed decisions and facilitates a voting process in an unbiased way. The program obtains a random sample size of the population and their emails via social media scraping and social media ads, and sends community questions generated from cohere, openAI NLP and twitter. Then sends these users a form to answer the questions, with tokens as gifts in the end for their participation, rating how much thought they put into answering the question

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding a way to gather a representative sample of the population. Additionally, ensuring that the information provided to the representatives was comprehensive and unbiased was another challenge, using Cohere. However, with determination and hard work, we were able to overcome these challenges and build a successful solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a developer team, we are proud of several accomplishments in the development of our project, CitizenVoice. One accomplishment is identifying a real-world problem that is of concern to communities and finding a way to use technology to address it. We are also proud of successfully recruiting a representative sample of the population through web scraping and populating our program with important information for informed decision-making. Additionally, we are proud of facilitating a voting process in an unbiased way, which is essential for democratic decision-making. Finally, we are proud of overcoming the technical challenges of building the system using google forms and Cohere Overall, we believe CitizenVoice has the potential to revolutionize the way communities engage in democratic decision-making, and we are excited to see the impact it will have.

What we learned

Understanding the needs and challenges of the community and identifying the relevant problems using Cohere and Open AI.

Familiarizing with web scraping and its applications in recruitment of representative sample population.

Importance of unbiased decision making and ensuring fair representation of opinions and voices of the community.

Understanding the challenges in facilitating a democratic voting process through technology.

Designing and implementing a user-friendly and effective solution to engage citizens and harness their collective intelligence.

What's next for CitizenVoice

Built With

• cohere
• google-docs
• openai
• python
• smtp