NextElection - the democracy OS

Problem

• Quality of democracy depends on effective accountability mechanisms
• Deep information asymmetry - govt and its agencies manipulate information and stats
• The public sphere has been hijacked - interactions that require little commitment and no skin in the game

Solution

NextElection brings together citizens, experts, political leaders and journalists for issue-based governance and accountability. It presents complex government structures in a way that does not overwhelm. It functions as an accountability directory for issues organized by territory and levels of government, empowering citizens to review the performance of political leaders. It enables participative policy-making, social audit and bottom up data generation.

Insights and analytics from the platform allow voters, policy makers and the community to make data-driven decisions. At scale, imagine the transformation that can be wrought across the country where citizens generate millions of open data points and feedback on the administration.

Quality of democracy depends on effective accountability mechanisms.

• Most countries have seen a failure of horizontal accountability, and hence it is of paramount importance to strengthen vertical accountability
• Systemic failures like this affect every citizen, and society suffers on issues of press / religious / free speech freedom, human rights, destruction of constitutional mechanisms & democratic governance procedures, etc, while at a local level the communities suffer on issues of civic amenities, corruption, environmental factors, etc.

Deep information asymmetry

• Critical information (policy formulation, legislative affairs, success of policies, etc) that must flow from the government and its agencies to citizens is denied or manipulated before release
• Quantitative data is the lifeblood of research, opinion, policy framing and decision making. In the absence of trustworthy data, the functioning of every department is suspect

The hijacked public sphere

• Public sphere gives the impression that everyone has the authority to speak - politicians, TV hosts, experts and public interact with little commitment and no skin in the game
• Detached from the local practices - the abstract discussions produce abstract conclusions, which cannot be applied
• Disempowered citizens and communities suffer from a pervasive mood of apathy, resignation and anger

We serve 3 sets of stakeholders: citizens (voters, researchers, journalists), expert groups (advocacy, thinktanks, social activists, etc), government (political leaders, departments). We recognize that we live in an interconnected networked system of democracy, and any solution must touch the lives and requirements of each of these.

We work with each of these groups to understand what we can offer to them as part of the democracy OS suite we are building. We also strongly believe in an ecosystem approach, and that given the scale and intractable nature of this problem statement, we simply cannot do things alone. So we've build partnerships and collaborations with stakeholders directly, or with other organizations in the ecosystem that given us insights and tribal knowledge about the stakeholders unique requirements or current adopted solutions.

We work with them by nimbly creating new tools for our partners on the existing scaffolding of the system we have built, iterating on them and then releasing these into production for everyone to freely use. For instance, one of our collaborators needed a robust unique survey tool integrated into the NextElection OS for mass household surveys in areas with spotty connectivity. This is now a mainstream product.

Citizens need (tech enabled) systems to discover and make sense of the political world, to meaningfully participate and become change agents and to stay updated with news and opinions from trusted sources. Expert groups need systems to reach citizens for information sharing, collective action and support and data collection. The government needs systems to enable policy and legislation discussion and input collection, etc.

Our solution is an operating system for democracy and governance, a deeply interwoven set of products and tools that serve the various use cases of the stakeholders and community described above. It functions as a (un)social network with standard tools for posting, commenting, up/down voting, notifications, etc.

And with specialized enablers:

Approach: Issue-based & Data-driven

Issues form the building blocks on the platform and are linked to:

• territories they are present in and impact
• persons that are accountable for them
• activists and experts working on them. 

Accountability directory and matrix:

There is a multitude of governance, with overlapping levels and overlapping territories. This complex governance structure is presented to the stakeholder in a way that is intuitive and of immediate value – be it to determine who are the candidates who are standing for elections, together with their detailed bios, promises, performance, persona data, political analysis and so on, or to determine who is the territory representative or to determine who is the person responsible for a particular issue, etc.

Channels & Citizen Engagement:

NE is territory-based. We track politicians, parties and issues at many levels: Assembly Constituency, Parliamentary Constituency, District, State and Country.

Once the user has selected their constituency, details from their territory tree are shown as clickable cards. Each card opens a Channel (webpage) with its own URL. 

On each channel, users can:

• provide rating and feedback
• post articles, polls, questions, opinions
• subscribe to the channel for personalized updates

Citizens can rate the performance of ministers on issues that they are responsible for.

Each channel functions as a one-stop library for anyone to come up to speed on the issue, or get a pulse of what’s been happening, coupled with feedback from citizens.

How is Next Election different from other networks? 

We’ve designed a network grounds up to focus on community, collective action and on real issues. Our mechanisms prevent abusive behavior by disallowing direct tagging of users, # tagging and following users.

1. India has a complicated governance structure, with overlapping levels of governance and territory, 4000+ parties, 100K+ serving or candidate politicians, and no clarity on who is responsible and accountable at what level. Making sense of this complex governance structure and presenting it for quick consumption on a mobile screen with limited real estate & low attention span is key to what we do. E.g. a small masterpiece - the Election Promises Tracker.
2. A empowered vertical accountability framework that auto-magically showcases who is responsible for each issue in a territory unit of governance, and allows citizens to rate the person’s performance
3. A deeply interconnected system that allows one to traverse in a single hop between issue, persona, party, content, accountability framework etc.
4. Since there are a great many languages in use in India, we support multiple languages in the interface.
5. We've built replicability and scale into the way we've designed the system. Whether it is 1 territory or 10s of thousands (from the level of village to parliamentary constituency), 10K personas or 100K, the system will easily scale and work just with relevant geo-political data being entered. Similarly, supporting more languages is a piece of cake.

1. A mobile first UX and UI that has been thoughtfully designed to

• not overwhelm the content and info being presented
• always present the context together with the content being presented,
• and to carefully link everything into a cohesive whole

2. Deeply linked to territory, since issues and governance is territorial. The tech we've built allows one to go from postal address to the "territory tree" in a single hop. The territory tree is the complete geo-political info for the user: whats the local governance unit (ward), the state governance unit (assembly constituency) to central governance unit (parl constituency), together with the associated incumbents, candidates, parties, ministers, issues and so on.

3. Software tech

• Website - JAM stack on the frontend talking to a Django backend
• Hybrid Android app
• Mapping and visualization engines

4. Supporting dozens of usecases with the same lean codebase to reduce the amount of time spent on the SW dev activities: a fully functional website & apps; entry points into the system which allows one to be signed in or not and to explore via many different pathways - either an article, or petition, or quiz, or survey, or an issue/persona/party channel, or a territory page, etc, each of which have a unique shareable URL; embeds; APIs and so on

1. We've taken a holistic view of this entire intractable problem statement and build the system as a network with utility even in single player mode, and with (future) network effects and critical mass. This system design aspect drives everything we do, and hence significant resources go into creating what we call the PGC (platform generated content). PGC creates measurable impact as seen during the months leading to the Indian General Elections where we had a large number of visitors and extensive media coverage.
   1. Examples: We've allowed candidates to be discovered in the General Elections with our detailed coverage and political analysis; we've run large scale quizzes and surveys to create awareness on political representation; and fake news, etc; we've enabled people to find their constituency as a free service; we've published our own policy research; etc
2. We've been attracting new partners at a steady pace, each of whom are excited to created bigger impact in collaboration with us. So the eco-system approach that we have taken is powerful and will pay dividends in the long run.
   1. Examples: We've successfully used the NextElection system to collect legislative inputs and send it to the Parl Commission working on a Bill, we've started using the NextElection system to enable young people to run for political office, and we've created the popular Election Promises Tracker, etc

Current about 100K in the months leading into the General Elections.

In 1 year, we expect to be 10X that, i.e. 1M

In 5 years, we expect to impact 200M people across multiple geographies

1. Bring back genuine participation to the hijacked public sphere

We want to help get the ecosystem out of the current extractive social media networks into a purpose built vertical network (that we are building), whose purpose is not merely to find ways to hook users and keep them endlessly on the platform. We want to enable the network and the tools we are building be a serious replacement for the existing networks, within the purpose of democracy, accountability and governance.

2. Help citizens choose leadership and influence policy in a way that supports society & human beings

The 2nd goal is to solve the illusion of choice that we have. It is hard for everyday citizens to discover civil, legislative and executive leaders across the various levels of governance, to understand meaningfully their worldview, background, perhaps shenanigans, criminal cases, education, as well as promises made and delivered, performance, etc. We want to really enable this across the various levels of elections and governance, and this will transform and galvanize society and our lives.

3. Democratize political marketing tools to remove the barrier for everyday citizens to contest (and win) elections

The third goal is to be able to offer the toolset that we are building and democratize electoneering and canvassing. Why should technology enabled canvassing and outreach tools be the domain of the few. Imagine if the playing field can be leveled and we have newer, younger elected representatives, from various backgrounds, and esp non-male.

The team is made up of serial entrepreneurs, ex startup founders, tech specialists, social activists, media personnel, public policy experts, lawyers and political campaign managers. It would be hard put to find a more balanced team.

We have partnered with close to 30 organizations across India so far - these work in the area of civic governance, media and publishing, political action committees, etc

It will be used to roll out a social audit tool for rural audiences in India. This is a massive problem and part of our drive to create bottom up data in order to quantize whether the services from the government and its agencies are correctly being delivered to the beneficiaries. This is an massive challenge waiting to to solved, and is an important piece of the accountability matrix that we are trying to create.