AppCivist Capabilities
The goal of AppCivist is to build a platform for democratic assembly and collective action, which will help people engage issues and places in their city, maintain rich discussions around alternative proposals, and eventually reach consensus about the best alternative. To realize this vision, AppCivist will rely on modular components, each supporting one of the following list of civic engagement capabilities that we define below.
The first group of civic engagement capabilities refer to the set of practices a group of citizens or activists can engage in order to identify problems and come to decisions about what to do about these problems. AppCivist proposed list of DC Capabilities are:
- Proposal Making: the process by which an individual, or a group of people, identify problems and create initiatives to address them, courses of actions in response to identified needs or, in its most simple form, simple ideas for tackling an issue. (from complex to simple…)
- Versioning: the process of managing and keeping track of the evolution of a given resource, which can represent, among other things, a proposal, the current result of a voting process, the state of a deliberation process, etc. In particular, versioning refers to the process of managing the development of a proposal from its initial draft to its final form.
- Deliberation: the careful consideration of a topic through comments and evidence. In AppCivist, it is the process by which a group of people discuss one or more topics (e.g., proposals, ideas, questions, etc.), with the goal of reaching a consensus. Participation in deliberation entails presenting arguments to reject, accept, praise, extend, comment or present alternatives to the topic in discussion, eventually moving the group to consensus by either voting on alternatives or simply summarizing the different arguments in the discussion.
- Voting: the process by which an individual, or a delegate, express preferences towards a certain proposal, idea or person; leading ultimately to a resulting general preference.
DC capabilities are supported by a number of other transversal practices, that make it possible to make decisions in a better, more informed, way and organize the work of people towards a goal. The following is the list of AppCivist EC Capabilities.
- Mapping: the process by which any given resource (e.g., a proposal, a report, a discussion, an event) is annotated with information about the specific geographical place to which is related.
- Visualization: the process of displaying or drawing data, information or knowledge in ways that are visual and the anyone can easily understand.
- Mobilization: the process by which a group of people organize (e.g., communicate, schedule, gather, etc.) to take action or to promote a particular idea.
- Working Groups: a space where a group of people gathers, either online or in face-to-face, to work together on a particular issue.
- Reporting: the process by which an individual or a group of people, communicates a specific situation or the state of a given action for the purpose of alerting or informing others.
- Implementing: the process by which a proposal or initiative becomes practice (i.e., operational)
We envision a process by which citizens and activist will report problems, identify issues, propose solutions, deliberate and eventually reach a consensus about what's the best alternative. The current draft of these development timeline is displayed below
