For anyone who saw my original suggestion regarding the Know Your Vote app, I have great news.
A friend of mine and her husband have decided to team up with me to take it up on our own!
I don’t want to give anyone a certain time, however she believes we may have a rough/basic functioning application by the end of the year.
Our primary focus is going to be on getting the Congress Senate & House functionality working which will include a roster of currently seated elected officials.
My friend who develops apple applications says absolute hardest part of it will be the filter function but as for the rest should be pretty easy just time consuming.
We plan to have allot of features that the every day voter will want for transparency and informative purposes.
For more information, @me or message me and I’ll get to you when I can.
We’re floating the idea of a podcast or discord!
Oh and the best part of it is we’re doing it through her husband’s CS class. The best app always gets used in future classes to showcase the skill sets learned by the course! Which means STUDENT EXPOSURE!
My scope is Android and web, though. I can provide assistance in anything from Data Analysis, Data science, and Statistics (AI included – except for LLMs, I haven’t delved into that yet).
That’s awesome! Are you planning to add a feature to search specific issues and groups working to get it passed. For example, searching corruption and finding Wolf-Pac as an organization working on this issue? Could be a helpful way to organize people.
The primary feature of the app will allow voters to see what the officials campaigned on vs what they have actually done in office.
For example. You will be able to see what bills they have brought to the floor or which way they voted on said bills. You will be able to see who their donors are, how much they’ve donated.
Our goal is to pack the app with absolutely as much information as possible so voters can be informed about what their elected officials have actually accomplished. This will allow them to decide on their own whether or not they deserve another term.
Now of course, there will be more features than the basic Congress feature.
We plan to add a section specifically just for bills called “Bills on the Floor” which will allow voters to see all bills that have been voted on including amendments that have been suggested and by whom they were suggested (so voters can see who is trying to tear apart or corrupt something the American people want), a Polling feature that will have polls from across America as well as admin submitted polling questions that voters can actively participate in, a source button and much more.
Obviously we want this to be the tool every voter uses in the future.
I’ve floated the idea of a Make A Change button which can take you to various movement resources. Trust me, we have a list of things we would like. But for now just getting a functioning app is our goal, baby steps lol @briskye13
I want to applaud your initiative, but as an software entrepreneur with more than 12 years launching my own apps and helping others I have to burst your bubble before you even start for everyone’s benefit.
The only point I want to make is, what makes you think the app is going to make a difference?
Will Maga voters use it? No. Will democratic or republican fanatics use it? No. Will progressives and independent use it? Yes, a certain percentage of them.
What percentage of the remaining voters will use it and will it be a better option than just reading/watching online videos and articles about their candidates, which is what they are already doing?
There are apps, sites, channels dedicated to doing the research we are talking about here. They have been doing it for decades. Please reach out to them and ask them if yet another app will make a difference. Is it going to stop making people getting opinions from Youtubers they trust who are already providing this info?
I think there are more effective ways of using your talents/time, such as a better TYT online experience, because they are already fumbling on this and has a huge tangible impact.
Here is another idea to help you maximize your efforts. Reach out to 5-6 independents/progressive elected public official and tell them you are building such platform to help them (and other honest politicians) highlight their voting record, their work, etc., and hear their feedback.
Another idea to maximize your effort, start a pre-launch campaign and see if you can get a pre-sign up of 100 people. This exercise will help you focus on the actual hard part, user acquisition. Getting real people really excited about being able to soon download the app.
However, if this is mostly for a class project/hobby, then definitively go for it and just worry about coding.
Hi intermediate coder here, I’m strong on the basics and formatting so if extra coding man power is needed I’ll be happy to help and join a discord cause this app is definitely needed among all voters, also have you taken a look into (vpap .org) I think that’s a good basis to compare from functionality wise
This cost of customer acquisition should be a measure of and idea success along side ethics.
I think this idea behind forcing people to commit actual dollars to sign-up coupled with, ethics, and cost of proliferation should all be looked at when pursuing opportunity cost weighting.
If I may be a bit pie in the sky, I’ve had ideas about an app that uses constituency input to display the popularity of various issues within various constituencies. Then, this would empower politicians interested in direct democracy, whom could vow to only vote in accordance with what is popular among their constituency. And their record on the matter could then be tracked. Such an option could also be publicized during campaigns, which would act as free advertisement for the app.
This idea is a tad different from this topic, but could be an idea to expand with at a latter point.
One thing to note about the idea, is that it would apply in areas irrespective of political leanings. Right wing voters would see the popularity of their voting preferences, and in the districts they are majority, they could see politicians follow through or not on what is popular. This is of course somewhat of a risk, since some non-progressive policies are in some places the popular positions, which would be empowered by the fair neutrality of such an app. However, I think in the long run that the fairness will, like history, be made to bend towards justice.
And then we would also expect to see progressive policies passed in right wing areas, since they approve of things such as paid family leave. And it would be their own ideas and power achieving it, rather than liberal elites shaming right wingers for voting against their own interests. For more info on some of my ideas, check out the topic thread, running progressive republicans.
If you are looking for STUDENT exposure, and already using programming/CS skills, may I humbly suggest joining it with my idea, as I also mentioned on another Operation Hope thread? My idea is to make use of the non profit, academic based Pro Truth Pledge - google it for more on what it is - by asking all candidates & media to take the pledge & using automation to help hold them to it.
By putting pressure on politicians, elected officials as they are, and media as well. We make them either take the pledge or explain why they refuse to basically say they will try to tell the truth & admit if something they said was not true. I am also working on getting automated help for calling them out, but what is really needed is public pressure for people to take the pledge. TYT members & the whole community watching could help a lot on that!
To clarify about student exposure, I work for a company that students use - it checks for plagiarism. I am hoping that they would support my idea, although nothing is definite on that front, but it could really help if we all work together.
I like the idea, I sure hope you can do it! With our current media problem, cutting through the misinformation and deceitful ads will be a challenge. I would suggest getting money out of politics as a priority to getting the Congress Senate & House functionality working, since they are happy with the current status quo. This will require the 28th amendment proposed by Wolf dash PAC dot com (also from Cenk), in my opinion. Perhaps your app can incorporate spreading this idea, it is making slow headway. The establishment is not going to fix it, they like it!
Jeff