Crowdsourcing isn’t just for start-ups anymore. Meet POLCO, an online and mobile application enabling policy crowdsourcing. Through the app, citizens can easily find relevant current policy proposals and city polls, subscribe to push notifications for issues in their physical or interest area, cast an authenticated vote, comment, share, interact with others, and track outcomes. City officials can generate broad, informed, and organized citizen participation data and glean key insights through beautiful data visualization dashboards to find time trends, local influencers, and pockets of support and opposition by district or demographic.
POLCO combines the ease of online polling, citizen identity verification, social and layers this civic participation technology suite on top of curated subsets of the agenda management system and custom polls and surveys loaded by the city, and then finally presents the whole experience through a simple clean beautiful user interface.
Whether a city experiences inhibited progress by a non-representative vocal few at city council, laments ineffective or inefficient interest group driven expenditures that broader participation by the previously unengaged majority could have cured, lose countless city staff and elected officials hours on one-on-one meetings and inaccurate polling systems that don’t reach all demographics, or lose time compiling inaccurate data into reports, POLCO delivers value for the city.
POLCO was one out of only seven companies chosen to participate in the Seed Sumo technology accelerator program in Texas out of 1300 applicants. It was also selected for participation in the Madison, Wisconsin Madworks program; and received the second-place award at the Notre Dame Zielsdorf Family Social Impact Presentation out of 66 companies.
Using old technology and systems, civic engagement at the city level is a struggle, but city-level policies are very important and can have big impacts quickly. In addition, city citizens are necessarily clustered geographically and messaging distribution channels already exist and are well-partnered with city governments. POLCO works with cities, local media, and email and social media distribution networks to generate unprecedented and organized participation data quickly and cost effectively.
Learn more about their progress, or ask them how your city can make the most of their technology on their website.
