A few notes about the Civici platform

Partecipa.civi.ci is the first deployment of a new platform developed by the <ahref Foundation.

It’s an e-democracy application designed to collect and sort proposals from members of a community. Our goal is to make it scalable from a condo to a country.

Partecipa - Civici

With this first version we introduce the proposal collection component. Any user can post proposals on different topics (on this instance there is a one proposal per topic limit, but it’s just a setting that can be changed on different environments). Users can express one opinion on each proposal (and they can change it, of course) and add links to proposals to expand and explain them.

One of the most interesting features is the triangle that we designed to collect a position, along with a written opinion, on all proposals.

triangle3x3

Just click green if you agree, red if you don’t agree; up if you fully understand the proposal, down if you don’t understand it, and everywhere in between. Of course, if you don’t understand you can’t agree or disagree. The goal is to use the voting patterns collected with this UI to help improving proposals.

This idea is based on the research of Pietro Speroni (along with all the maths of the project), and we are looking forward to start working on the results. After the first couple of days exposed to real users, it seems to be working nicely: we can already start to understand the general feeling on some proposals by looking at the automatically generated “heatmap”.

Screen Shot 2013-09-27 at 18.45.14

Next on our roadmap is working on the sorting of proposals. Users will be able to decide which proposals are more important for them, and from the analysis of this data se should be able to understand the priorities of a community.

A very interesting project, developed with a truly international team spanning from Trento to London, from Milano to Delhi. I’m very proud to be part of such a great team.

3 thoughts on “A few notes about the Civici platform”

  1. Very nice and interesting project; what is the path to get a custom installation of the system? Is there some available to download and install (that I have not found), or is this going to be an hosted solution we need to register for?

    1. Right now civi.ci i part of the ahref ecosystem: for example user registration is based on the Civiclinks platform. In the short term we expect new instances of the platform for new communities/projects to be provided as saas within the ahref environment.

      Releasing the platform as an open source project is most definitely a possibility for the future, as of today a final decision has not been made.

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