When Democracy Doesn’t Work
CivicDuty is simple. It lets you see who all of your elected officials are (at every level, from your city’s council, to your nation’s legislature), what they’re doing in government, and how that affects the issues you care about. It uses AI to simplify complex legislation, only pulls from official government sources, and always links back to where it received its data. You can check it out here: https://civicduty.app/ (currently in Beta for the State of Georgia).
The story behind CivicDuty starts with one of the greatest dangers to democracy, and one of the least discussed: apathy.
It began on a visit home from college. I’d been trying to understand how my government worked, and felt utterly clueless. I was able to vote, I was in college, and couldn’t say what 90% of the people who represented me in government actually did. Worse yet, I kept on coming across this strange feeling of apathy that seemed to lurk everywhere that had to do with politics. The general agreed-upon idea that there is no use being involved in or even knowing about politics, because nothing you’d do would matter. The system was broken, the status quo fixed in stone, there was no point in trying, etc. I’m sure everyone has had an uncle, friend, or stranger online tell them something along those lines.
As someone with a disability who often relied heavily on laws that made it possible for me to attend college, that feeling of apathy didn’t sit right with me. Everyone cared about something, and politics affected everything. I wanted to know how other people actually thought instead of assuming it, and if the apathy I’d felt was even real in the first place. So a friend and I surveyed 50 people in my hometown starting with the basic question: “Do your elected officials care what you think?” ~75% said no, with the national average to this question being ~85% saying no.
This was what we’d already assumed, but we wanted to take things a step further. So we asked as a follow-up, “Do you know who your elected representatives are?”
Few could name their congressman. Very few could name their state legislator. Almost none could name their City Councilor, County Commissioner, or Board of Education Member. Some freely admitted they didn’t even know what several of those positions were. Yet all of them agreed on the same thing: These people directly affected the actual issues they cared about.
It was a strange paradox. The more local a position was in government, the more it affected the daily life of citizens, and the less they actually knew about it. We wanted to understand why that was, so we asked our participants. Ultimately, it boiled down to the single most valuable resource everyone has, and nobody can ever get enough of. Time.
People couldn’t spend hours having to sift through their state legislature’s laws, city council’s meeting minutes, or county commission’s agendas. They rarely had the chance to attend meetings, and even if they did, just learning how the system worked took time as well. Every city was different, and intense legal jargon, antiquated systems, and hard-to-navigate websites made things even harder.
So my team (now consisting of myself and two friends from high school) and I asked: What if there was one website that showed users who their elected officials were, what they were doing in government, and how that affected issues they cared about, in a simple, easy, and accessible format?
And so, we created CivicDuty - a platform which shows people how government works, and makes it feel easy to understand, simple, and accessible.
Since then, our focus has been on developing the platform further, through conversations with stakeholders and an unwavering commitment towards quality, accuracy, and transparency. We’ve had 100+ conversations with elected officials, lobbyists, policy professors, student activists, government employees, etc. and focused on creating a single, verifiable, and unbiased explanation of what’s happening.
The site is currently in Beta and only covers the Georgia State Legislature and select counties and cities across the state. However, our goal is to expand into other states, and one day countries across the globe.
While we’re still a little shy of that, the Millennium Fellowship has been especially helpful in priming us to start having those global conversations now, instead of treating it like a problem to be solved once we reach it. By emphasizing a global perspective early on in development, we want to build something that could be applied anywhere, while respecting everywhere it covers. It’s what’s guided us to avoid mistakes like generalizing every local government into the same categories or terms, just because it’s easier. It’s what’s pushed us to respect the history, culture, and traditions of every city, township, and hamlet, reflected in their unique government procedures and terminology, by building our app around them instead.
Through respecting every stakeholder, past, present, and future, we hope to not only avoid short-sighted decisions, but strengthen our long-term goals.
Democracy doesn’t work when the people being represented can't understand the government that represents them. Only by changing the way that government feels, and removing the barriers to accessibility, can we create a future where anyone anywhere can learn what’s going on in government, and what they can do about it in 5 minutes.
If you’re interested in learning more, would like to support development, or simply want to see the platform in action directly, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Feedback is the one thing which helps us make something that people actually want to use, instead of what we think they want to use.
Feel free to connect with me directly at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saifaslam/
And before you hop off this article, ask yourself: Can you name the people who represent you?
Article written by Aslam Saif, Millennium Fellowship Alumni, Georgia Institute of Technology
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