Connecting the Power of Apps: DemTools and Poplus

At the heart of it, NDItech’s new DemTools are about connecting people to democratic processes. Whether someone is a politician, interested citizen, donor or voter, his or her ability to connect to and communicate with others is essential to making democracy work. Technologies that are easy, accessible, and affordable can go a long way towards helping to improve those connections.

DemTools isn’t the only project trying to solve these sorts of problems. The future of civic tech is in cooperation, collaboration and sharing. So, when we look at DemTools and try to envision an influential and effective future for them, we find it helpful to look at what other organizations are doing in terms of developing open-source, easy access tools.

Poplus, an open federation of people and organizations founded in April 2014, is one of the most impressive of those groups. Poplus aims to save people and organizations’ time and money through the process of collaborative civic coding and sharing stories/lessons learned. This focus is particularly evident in the federation’s development of Poplus Components, which are a series of open sourced, free use, independent apps and widgets developed to solve a range of common problems encountered when building civic and democratic websites.

As of now, there are 6 Poplus Components:

• Represent Boundaries: a web API to geographic areas like electoral districts that allows users to easily find pertinent areas and display location-based information, like profiles of electoral candidates.

• SayIt: a web service which makes it easy to store and retrieve written transcripts and written statements made by politicians and other public figures.

• MapIt: a widget that makes it easy to find out which administrative area (i.e county, city, region) covers a particular geographic point.

• WriteIt: a public person messaging tool which allows users to avoid the hassle of mail servers, creating special gmail accounts for one’s website.

• PopIt: a tool to make it easy to create and maintain lists of politicians and their basic biographical information as structured data, without requiring technical skills.

• BillIt: a flexible document storage tool that will keep bills, contracts and papers (among other things) tidy, labeled, accessible and findable.

One of the things I find most interesting about the components is their modular nature. Each of these single-purpose elements are easier to maintain and improve than one monolithic system, and enable one to tie them together into sophisticated, customized webapps. This same flexibility is very intriguing for integration into DemTools. While similar in philosophy and purpose, the specific niches filled by many of the Poplus Components differ considerably from the four DemTools recently launched by us here at NDItech.

One potentially effective connection between DemTools and Poplus Components could be the integration of the MapIt and Represent Boundaries features into the CiviMP and CiviParty tools. This connection could help increase visualization of party and campaign organizing and constituent outreach, making campaigns more efficient and effective. Just think about how helpful a detailed map of supporters, donors, and interested voters could be for an MP on the campaign trail. Better organized voter canvassing, more intelligent campaign strategy, and more efficient use of valuable resources could all result from an integration of the two tools.

While we have to admit that there isn’t a single magic bullet when it comes to technology for the support of democratic processes, there isn’t anything wrong with thinking about the positive change that can result from the combination and connection of the strategies, ideas, and tools that we do have - Poplus Components and DemTools being a couple of important examples. By adapting an attitude of openness, and exploring inventive ways in which we can use these tools together, our work in this space can become much more effective.