Empower

Inspiration

Build a progressive and cohesive society by bringing in tools and technology to enable effective communication between various stakeholders. [Citizens and Public officials]

What it does

It provides a way for any citizen to browse profiles of Public officials in their local area, or a wider geographical area. Users can also provide anonymous feedback, and overall rating of their experience with a public official. It builds accountability into the system where Citizens can voice their joys and concerns to the public officials service them.

This system emphasizes on quality and there are appropriate controls in place for detecting abusive feedback and appropriate ranking system to learn about bad actors.

From the Public official perspective: Enabled him/her to open a communication channel with the user providing feedback Can learn from the constructivi feedback provided by the citizens and also see how he is influencing fellow citizens’ lives Can check the performance of my organisation (local police station) by checking aggregated and individual stats for my reportees

How I built it

We used the Android SDK to build an android application for our use case. We used the following additional technologies on top of ADT: Google app engine to handle backend heavy APIs and database - using cron job to retrieve up to date data for offline use. Twitter API for user signup with phone verification Used kotlin android to use functional programming heavily Lots of other libraries

Challenges I ran into

Crawling public information of profiles of public officials [There are no standard api for gathering this information] Abuse prevention - We are verifying individual user accounts by their phone number to prevent logged out users or fake users from posting feedback for public officials.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Proud of building a quick hack solution that demonstrates the basic capabilities of the end vision on which we want to execute This system will go a long way to empower citizens and overall help us to make a progressive society

What I learned

Team work and collabration - We basically quickly hacked something that would take at least a week to develop in a hacky form More insights into the kind of public data that is available for the Public officials