A glimpse into the power of NextElection

In Part 1, Making a case for political accountability, we talked about how several institutional weaknesses affect the quality of democracy. One of the biggest challenges for improving the quality of democracy revolves around how to build more effective accountability mechanisms. (May we recommend reading Part 1 first which articulates the problem we are attempting to solve.)

Introducing NextElection

NextElection has been conceived as an empowered vertical accountability framework that will be used by citizens, electorate, civil society and the media and journalists to bridge the gap between people and their elected representatives and the executive. Its a deep collaboration space with features, community and value that is purpose built for specific use-cases.

An important facet of the platform is the ability to create a transparent world, refocused on the issues that impact us as citizens and human beings — jobs, community, family, education, healthcare, the environment, and more.

On the platform, issues are the building blocks of conversations, politician ratings, election manifesto mapping, civil society causes and a lot more. Citizens have the ability to throw their problems into the ring, and to vote for problems that are important to them. This allows the issues that are most important to the majority, in a geographical area, to automatically surface and be prioritized. Thus at the level of the city, issues such as road infrastructure, building permits, clean drinking water etc might be prioritized, while at the level of a province it might be employment, business regulations, sharing of natural resources between states, etc.

The platform allows rich visualization of issues on a dashboard as a hierarchy, or cross connected issue stacks, or based on geography etc. Issue dashboards serve to educate & enable all stakeholders (citizens, civil society, practitioners, experts, government and civic agency appointed representatives and elected people’s representatives) to coalesce around issue clusters that can then be cooperatively solved.

Election manifestoes and individual politician’s promises are mapped to issues, and voted on by people, thus creating data driven rating scorecards for politicians, policies and politicians that hold infinite promise to remove the veil of secrecy from electioneering.

Such scorecards can be used to inform & educate the electorate, to aid decision making and vote casting. They can be used by political parties and politicians to perform real performance appraisals and to determine in real time the issues that they need to act on to not lose public support, or not be voted out in the next election.

NextElection creates historical trends (timelines of issues and scorecards) to empower voters before elections such that they are able to vote based on historical quantitative data rather than the most recent appeasement policy of the government. Such trends are also an immense aid for policy making by the agencies of the state.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. We invite you to be the candle and we’ll be your mirror.

Originally published at blog.nextelection.com on December 18, 2017.