Proactive-Citizens

Inspiration

On one hand, decision-makers such as public authorities or local municipalities lack access to citizens’ opinion, ideas and feedback in order to make more informed judgements.

On the other hand, citizens are unengaged within their communities and have no say in the decision-making process from public authorities or local municipalities that affect their daily lives.

In the conception and improvement of services, the approach that gives the best results today puts the user at the center of the design (user-centered design). Collaborative design (co-design) allows users, stakeholders, and designers to collaborate bringing results of great satisfaction for both parties.

In the public service, i.e. essential services for citizens, these approaches would be fundamental, yet there is a lack of tools to apply them. This brings frustration to citizens and parties involved, who feel ignored. and does not allow those involved in the public service to access important information for the improvement of services.

What it does

Engaging communities and citizens in decision-making process

Proactive-Citizens is an online platform/website that brings citizens and communities together into the decision making process. Information is exchanged between the local authority and citizens - with the objective to turn citizens’ opinions into more informed and effective decisions.

Decision-makers/local municipalities can ask for ideas / opinions to the citizens relating to a specific subject, initiative or challenge.

Citizens have the opportunity to participate and influence the decisions, by sharing their views, and therefore contribute meaningfully to specific decisions that impact their lives.

Use cases

1. Small towns Some small municipalities need to improve care for the elderly to make them self-sufficient and healthy for as long as possible.

2. Metropolitan areas With the current COVID-19 situation, the society is entering a period of economic instability and recession, where (small) businesses face challenges in order to prosper financially. There is a need for new initiatives in order to provide new opportunities to affected individuals / businesses.

Citizens, associations or companies can:

Exhibit examples that are already successfully tested elsewhere
Make informed proposals related to the territory and the community
Lay the foundations for collaborative solutions
Share their real difficulties and ask for help or solutions

How we built it

We came up with our concept during the VersusVirus Hackathon. after that 48 hours of hacking/coding. we took some time to do some user interview and iterate over our initial idea. We believe that our platform could be use also in Canada, small and big municipalities and cities could benefits from our platform.

Me and my teammate Claudia Borio, are both have experience in establishing new startups. As we already launched two startups in past. Therefore during this hackathon we used our experience on how to start a new innovative idea.

After some brainstorming how can we address the challenge #1079, we came up with some low-fi wireframes, tested and validated with some potential users, showed to some Mentor and collected feedback, afterward we built our prototype and started to code a MVP.

Challenges we ran into

As in our team we lack someone with copywriting skill ( a communication professional), we have to deal with preparing our presentation, video, and texts for submissions, that took us some time. We believe that we still need to improve our copy and pitch deck to better present the problem we are solving and our solution

Accomplishments that we're proud of

formed a team of two people (Full Stack Developer and UX & Service Designer), the team is aligned in terms of vision and next steps
Validation is performed with ~10 citizens
A clickable prototype built
MVP is being build now

What's next for Proactive-Citizens

We would like to develop our MVP (first version) and launch it soon.
To go live, we need funding for the final development of the platform, for the marketing and sales costs therefore we are looking for a small funding to cover some cost