The New Chicago Machine

Inspiration

In 2020 the federal government released $403 million for COVID relief, $281 million of which went to an ineffective policing system that has been called out for the Department of Justice for its systemic problems. Mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to meet the demands of Chicago citizens, but she’s not alone. Across the country it seems major political decisions are more and more based upon donorship than actual statistical research or public opinion. Because the government of Chicago does not adequately act as an actor for the people, we have made it our mission to create our own NewChicagoMachine. Here we have the power to speak and connect with donors ourselves and challenge set limitations that sparsely connected orgs have in accomplishing major catalytic projects. Our aim is to connect every actor in politics from NGOS to the working class to make changes around these issues. We had to consider how to make the platform easily accessible and easily shareable for those who traditionally are less well-versed in complicated technology which is often crucial to modern organizing. We solved this by framing posts around easy-to-find categories. We also had to consider how to sort each initiative category and how to make trending topics appear. We solved this by at first sorting the categories manually, focusing on topics that are especially pressing, while also leaving room for user-submitted topics in the future. Lastly, we considered the best ways to inspire action through the platform. We wanted to create spaces to perform outreach while also not disclosing sensitive information. We created pages like the contact page and resources to help facilitate action.

What it does

Provides a digital platform to connect activist organizations, communities, and initiatives to each other in order to build community power and knowledge.

How it would be built

The New Chicago Machine is a web app. We would use HTML, CSS, and JS frameworks to create a workable app. We used Figma to create prototypes.

Challenges/Questions we ran into

How might organizations and individual civilians approach the website differently? Some users may just want to find volunteer opportunities, others may be small organizations who are looking for those same volunteers. How might we design the website to have a friendly user-interface, easily accessible to all? What kind of structural flow do we want for the user? Education vs Action -> Topic or Topic -> Education vs Action?

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the sheer unfathomable amount of network this could create for grass roots movements, the wealth of information and purpose we can share between on ground initiatives and universities, and the effectiveness of its model which is fairly simple but also clear.

What we learned

We learned that in order to truly ground our values of being for the people we have to move past our own biases. This means contacting orgs to discover what catalytic initiatives they will deem as most pertinent to highlight or include on this hub of political advancement.

What's next for The New Chicago Machine

We have already contacted multiple actors within the city from Chief Content creator Steve Edwards to the alumni of Chicago 200. All are ready to actively invest in such an idea to build more political power for the people by the people.

Built With

• figma