TIcracia - Hack the Power

We want to increase citizen participation so they can be informed about politics, who are their candidates for the elections and they can participate in the process of public politics creation through questionnaires. To do so we have created a digital platform that can gather data about those topics, and show the proposals of people summarized with data representations. The lack of citizen participation is a constant problem worldwide, because few politicians and decision makers have updated them selves with the modern world and engaged with young people, so our platform is a way to promote and solve this problem that can be applied to any country, city or neighbourhoods.

Information about governance plans of political parties is not known at the time of voting and choosing candidates to be elected because these documents can be very confusing and long technical reads that people can not process easily and so there is no interest to know what are they about, and as a result people is discontent with their governments because they were not totally or partially informed, but these plans are not always structured with people thoughts and needs, because collect this information is practically impossible due to the quantity of people in any country. This problem affects to every citizen in the world in every country, and the participation is lower in young people, this fact is really worrying, in the Australian 2016 election there were 950000 not enrolled voters in the range of 18-24 years, probably because politicians does not include much content to attract young people, so they feel ignored because the new generations like Millenials and Z, have grown in a different environment and context, with other needs and ways to communicate.

We are trying to solve the lack of citizen participation focused especially on young people, that are the most uninformed and less interested. To propose a solution we have done surveys to know their view on politics, how they participate and if they are interested and we have also participate in lots of events related to politics in our country, done by different foundations that are engaged with these topics, as a conclusion we have found young people that are interested participating in solutions for their communities, and want to be heard, but there is no way (rather than social networks) to speak up. We also have talked with the eight political parties that are competing for the election, to show them what we want to do to increase participation around the population.

We have created a web platform (https://ticracia.com) that is looking for the people can make hear their voice... LITERALLY, with the help of users opinions, memes and votes so that decisions makers can visually see all the thoughts in people's mind, because there is no other way in our modern society so politicians can hear the voice of everybody and propose governance plans or public politics about it.

To create a link with both citizens and political parties we are a non-partisan organization to be a valid intermediary actor between citizenship and politicians, to do so we provide the following services:

• Ask for important questions to users, these questions must be created in order of important subjects that can be useful and turned into public politics, these questions can be answered with a vote, a comment or image/meme (self edited), as a result of these questions create visual reports with data analysis and Machine Learning alghoritms on the voting count, word clouds on comments, memes analysis (about the most popular ones and their text associated)

•  Provide an easy to read and search version of the governance plans of actual political parties, so people can also comment with text or images, and the resulting the analysis of these data can be seen by the political parties.

• Make events about key topics we discovered, create debate between young people and make them understand the importance of their opinion and participation.

• Start political debates with the candidates, as a civil society initiative.

Our solution is innovative because we are creating a new space to participate without a partisan side and bringing open data to the people and especially to decision makers with data analysis tools

The core technology we are using is Machine Learning algorithms to analyse the different content people upload to the platform

We think this is a good way to solve this problem because there is no other organization informing the people what are the proposals of the different candidates, doing it in an impartial way 

We are currently serving around 100 people

In a year we plan to serve around 5000 people

In five years we plan to serve around 100000 people

Our goals in the next five years is reach other countries so they can use our platform to increase citizen participation and transparency for their governments, we also plan to expand our platform into a more sophisticated technology, more social. We also want to get a bigger team because this particular work needs lots of different expertise fields.

Our biggest problem is financial and marketing techniques to expand our selves and so the people can get to know it

We are looking forward alliances with other organizations that currently work with these subjects, we think they can help us a lot.

We are 4 people working as full-time staff as founders

And there are 2 people working as part-time staff

We have faced this problem in a multidisciplinary way, we have different point of views in our area of expertise

Currently we have not partnered with any organization so far, our possible partner is Fundacion Construir that will help gathering data and promoting TIcracia in social media

Our business model bases strongly on data analysis (with more features) that political parties and other decision makers can be interested to know, this is done by offering different levels of analysis

We expect to get financial sustainability by selling data analysis and getting funds by other organizations that could have interest in our project.

Solve can help us a lot with financial and media cover, those are the most important things we need right now, because we plan to organize events and need more development of our platform, so we need more developers to support it, and we need to pay them

We are planning to partner with foundations and Universities:

• KAS Foundation
• Hans Siedel Foundation
• FES Foundation
• Fundación Construir
• UNIFRANZ
• UCB
• EMI