PROJECT DIRECTION

The original idea of our project was designing a service for crowdsourced tracking of public representatives. We didn’t make any substantial changes to the core idea of our project.

The service will take the form of a smartphone app. The user will be able to subscribe to the notifications about a given representative, in order to receive updates about their recent activity, as well as to report any of that information to contribute to the crowdsourced knowledge base. The purpose of the app is to link the constituents closer with their elected representatives by establishing broad real-time engagement.

One aspect that is important for the platform we are designing is to support user reporting of spam, abuse, and fake information. For that purpose, we will outline the related functionality of the app later in the design process.

TASK EXAMPLES

#1
Sarah is a U.S. citizen who currently studies at UBC. Sarah has not been very interested in politics before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. She was appalled by the subtle/ bold statements that the new U.S. president made during his campaign, and deeply shocked by the effect they imposed on women. She decided to learn more about how policies imposed by law and traditional glass ceiling affect women’s well-being and social circumstances both in the United States and around the world. Sarah initially started reading multiple subscriptions only to find out that lots of them are composed with fake information or trivia. She is looking for a news platform which would keep her up to date with any policy change or statement made by the new U.S. president.

#2
Tom is a local political reporter who attends plenty of events in the community, where he interacts with public representatives from time to time. He likes to spread the word about their current activities by posting updates on his social media accounts, and he also writes short articles for the media company he works for. However, he is not always able to share that information as frequently and quickly as he would like to, since he doesn’t want to overload his social media presence, and the publication process in his media company is somewhat slow and complicated. He is also very interested in receiving detailed information about the agendas of several figures he is following. He is subscribed to several newsletters and checks a number of government websites from time to time. He often finds it difficult to find and aggregate that information on his own.

#3
Mike is a father of two who is very busy with his day-to-day life (I.e work, family commitments, etc.) and has very little spare time, however he is interested in following the political news that affect him. He is subscribed to several news outlets on social media, and he occasionally watches political commentary shows on television and online. In his community, a major pipeline project has recently been approved, and he wants to closely follow the news about that project. For that specific purpose, he created an automatic email news digest, which sends updates to him from time to time. Mike would like to spend less time filtering through different news pieces to find the information that is relevant to him. He wants to be more in control of the updates that he gets, and he is also interested in receiving those faster.